Book Image

Unreal Engine Virtual Reality Quick Start Guide

By : Jessica Plowman
Book Image

Unreal Engine Virtual Reality Quick Start Guide

By: Jessica Plowman

Overview of this book

With the ability to put players directly in the game, virtual reality gives users the chance to experience digital worlds directly. Nevertheless, many designers are unsure where to start when working with this amazing technology. With this book, you will learn user experience design processes and create immersive gameplay experiences designed for entertainment and player comfort. Using the power of Unreal Engine 4’s Blueprint visual scripting language, you will build player interaction and locomotion systems from scratch and use these flexible systems to create a sample game, as well as develop functional 2D and 3D user interfaces for players to interact with. And also learn the best practices for creating game art for virtual reality. Finally, you will learn how to test your application with your target audience and finalize your game for distribution. By the end of this book, you will have the knowledge to be able to make the leap from traditional game development to creating immersive virtual reality experiences using Unreal Engine 4.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Performance-boosting techniques

With the player's comfort to consider and all of these limitations, how are designers creating amazing 3D worlds for VR users to step into? The answer can be summed up in the phase fake it till you make it. The technology behind VR is rapidly evolving. New techniques for dealing with the issues we've mentioned are being built into the next generation of game engines. However, for now, there are some best practices currently being used by artists in the industry today to deliver amazing visuals, such as the showdown demo from Epic Games:

The showdown demo from Epic Games

These guys were able to render this amazing scene at 90 FPS. There is transparency, lighting, and visual effects. The models used are from various other UE4 demos and are not reduced in quality. Here is just some of how they did it.

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