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

Favor simple solutions


Sadly, you're going to run into developers who write complicated, impenetrable code or blueprints in a mistaken effort to impress everyone else with how smart they are. They're secretly fantasizing that someone else is going to look over their shoulder at their unreadable code and think, Wow! They must be so smart! I can't read any of that. Please, oh please, don't be this developer.

The experienced developers whose respect you really want won't be impressed by a shambolic blueprint or obfuscated code. They'll wonder why you left it in such a mess and assume that it's because you didn't know any better. Amateurs write unreadable code. Pros know they're going to have to maintain it a year from now when they've forgotten everything about it, and they don't want to make that job any harder than it has to be.

You'll know you're doing it well if your make it right draft is simpler and cleaner than your make it work draft was.