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

Rubber-duck debugging


You may have heard this phrase before: rubber-duck debugging. It's been around a long while and it's one of the most effective problem-solving tricks you can perform. The idea here is simple. Take anybody who will listen, and if there's nobody around, a rubber duck on your desk would do just as well (hence the name). Describe the problem you're trying to solve, out loud, and in simple terms. This forces you to organize your thoughts about the problem. If you find that you can't describe the problem in clear, simple terms, then you don't understand it yet. You're not ready to try to answer the question because you're not yet clear on what question you need to ask. Play with it and explore it until you really can phrase it in simple terms. Often, this process alone will suggest a clear solution to you, and if not, you now have a much better shot at finding a solution because you now know what question you're asking. Do this out loud or in writing. It's too easy to stay fuzzy and gloss over things when you let it tumble around in your mind. Force yourself to put the words in order. You'll be surprised by how powerful and effective this technique is.