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

Using more of the VRExpansion plugin


VRExpansion is a large plugin, and it provides a great deal of functionality to VR developers. Now that you have some strategies in place for exploring it and figuring out how it works and how you can use it, you're going to be able to unlock enormous potential.

In addition to the character we've just explored, this plugin provides a VR-enabled player controller, an AI controller, stereo widgets, buttons, levers, and much more.

If you'd like to get a better sense of what this plugin includes (there's far too much to fit within this chapter), hit the View Options popout in your content browser, turn on Show Plugin Content, and make sure Show C++ Classes is visible:

 

Browse through the class directory and see what's in there. If you double-click any of these classes, its native source will open in Visual Studio.

One of your best resources though is the VR Expansion Plugin forum at UnrealEngine.com, found here: https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion...