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

Chapter 3. Hello World - Your First VR Project

It's time to start building! Back in Chapter 1, Thinking in VR, we learned what VR is and what it can do, and we learned a number of best practices for its design. Then, in Chapter 2, Setting up Your Development Environment, we set up our development environment. Now we're ready to start building.

In this chapter, we're going to build a VR project in Unreal from the ground up. We're going to take a different approach, though, from most tutorials. Rather than just give you a list of steps to follow, for each thing we do we're going to talk a bit about what's going on under the hood and why we're doing it this way. This is what's really important. If you understand a bit about how these systems work, you'll be much better equipped to understand what to do when you build your own projects.

As we build our first VR project, we're going to learn a bit about its structure, and we'll learn about the specific project settings that apply most to VR development...