Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Virtual Reality Projects

By : Kevin Mack, Robert Ruud
Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Virtual Reality Projects

By: Kevin Mack, Robert Ruud

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) is a powerful tool for developing VR games and applications. With its visual scripting language, Blueprint, and built-in support for all major VR headsets, it's a perfect tool for designers, artists, and engineers to realize their visions in VR. This book will guide you step-by-step through a series of projects that teach essential concepts and techniques for VR development in UE4. You will begin by learning how to think about (and design for) VR and then proceed to set up a development environment. A series of practical projects follows, taking you through essential VR concepts. Through these exercises, you'll learn how to set up UE4 projects that run effectively in VR, how to build player locomotion schemes, and how to use hand controllers to interact with the world. You'll then move on to create user interfaces in 3D space, use the editor's VR mode to build environments directly in VR, and profile/optimize worlds you've built. Finally, you'll explore more advanced topics, such as displaying stereo media in VR, networking in Unreal, and using plugins to extend the engine. Throughout, this book focuses on creating a deeper understanding of why the relevant tools and techniques work as they do, so you can use the techniques and concepts learned here as a springboard for further learning and exploration in VR.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
12
Where to Go from Here
Index

Setting up the project


For this chapter's project, we don't need anything from our previous work, so we're going to begin simply by creating a new project with the following settings:

  • Blank Blueprint template
  • Mobile / Tablet hardware target
  • Scalable 3D or 2D graphics target
  • With Starter Content (we'll use some of the starter content in this one)

We still need to set our settings appropriately for VR, as we do with each project. Here's the cheat sheet:

  • Project | Description | SettingsStart in VR: True
  • Engine | Rendering | Forward Renderer | Forward Shading: True
  • EngineRendering | Default Settings | Ambient Occlusion Static Fraction: False
  • Engine | Rendering | Default SettingsAnti-Aliasing Method: MSAA
  • Engine | Rendering | VRInstanced Stereo: True
  • Engine | Rendering | VRRound Robin Occlusion Queries: True

Allow the project to restart once all of these settings have been set. Once your project has reopened, you'll be ready to begin learning about how media works in Unreal Engine.