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Unreal Engine 4 Virtual Reality Projects

By : Kevin Mack, Robert Ruud

4.6 (18)

Unreal Engine 4 Virtual Reality Projects

4.6 (18)

By: Kevin Mack, Robert Ruud

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 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.

Preface

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

Get in touch

Free Chapter

Thinking in VR

Thinking in VR

What is virtual reality?

What can we do in VR?

Immersion and presence

Best practices for VR

Planning your VR project

Summary

Setting Up Your Development Environment

Setting Up Your Development Environment

Prerequisite – VR hardware

Setting up Unreal Engine

Setting up for mobile VR

Using the Epic Games launcher

Setting up for C++ development

Building Unreal from source code

Additional useful tools

Summary

Hello World - Your First VR Project

Hello World - Your First VR Project

Creating a new project

Summary

Getting Around the Virtual World

Getting Around the Virtual World

Teleport locomotion

Seamless locomotion

Going further

Summary

Interacting with the Virtual World - Part I

Interacting with the Virtual World - Part I

Starting a new project from existing work

Creating hands

Summary

Interacting with the Virtual World - Part II

Interacting with the Virtual World - Part II

Creating an object we can pick up

Creating a Blueprint Interface for pickup objects

Implementing the Pickup and Drop functions

Setting up VRHand to pick up objects

Going further

Summary

Creating User Interfaces in VR

Creating User Interfaces in VR

Getting started

We’re not alone – adding an AI character

Adding a UI indicator to the companion pawn

Adding an interactive UI

Summary

Building the World and Optimizing for VR

Building the World and Optimizing for VR

Setting up the project and collecting assets

Using the VR editor

Optimizing scenes for VR

Addressing frame rate problems

Summary

Displaying Media in VR

Displaying Media in VR

Setting up the project

Playing movies in Unreal Engine

Displaying stereo video

Displaying 360 degree spherical media in VR

Playing stereoscopic 360 degree video

Controlling your Media Player

Summary

Creating a Multiplayer Experience in VR

Creating a Multiplayer Experience in VR

Testing multiplayer sessions

Understanding the client-server model

Setting up our own test project

Network replication

Creating network-aware pawns for multiplayer

Going further

Summary

Taking VR Further - Extending Unreal Engine

Taking VR Further - Extending Unreal Engine

Creating a project to house our plugin

Using VRExpansion classes

Making sense of complicated blueprints

Using more of the VRExpansion plugin

Summary

Where to Go from Here

Where to Go from Here

Final word

Useful Mind Hacks

Useful Mind Hacks

Rubber-duck debugging

Just the facts

Describing your solutions in positive terms

Plan how you're going to maintain and debug your code when you write it

Favor simple solutions

Look it up before you make it up

Research and Further Reading

Research and Further Reading

Unreal Engine resources

VR resources

Other Books You May Enjoy

Other Books You May Enjoy

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Setting Up Your Development Environment

The goal of this chapter is to get you set up to develop in Unreal Engine. Even if you've already installed and started working in the engine, you may still find it worthwhile to take a look through this chapter, as there are a few details of the installation process that might be useful to you.

We're also going to take a look at the Epic Games launcher. It's easy to get into the habit of looking at it just as a way of updating the engine and launching projects, but there's a huge collection of useful resources for learning and development there too. It would be a mistake to ignore them.

For those planning to develop for mobile VR on Oculus Go or Samsung Gear, we'll walk you through the process of setting up the Android SDK and setting up a project for deployment to the device, and finally for those interested in...

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Tech Concepts

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Programming languages

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