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 11. Taking VR Further - Extending Unreal Engine

One of the major factors that differentiates professional developers from the newbies is how they leverage existing tools and libraries to accelerate their work. Very often, new developers try to do everything themselves, either because they're unaware of resources that could help them or because they think that leaning on an existing library is somehow cheating. It isn't. If you're a photographer, you're not cheating if you didn't build your own camera in your garage—you're focusing on the part of your art that actually matters to you. Don't be afraid to make use of tools and libraries that can accelerate your development.

Here's the rub though: to make effective use of another developer's work, you need to put in the effort to understand what they're doing. Don't simply paste in someone else's code without really understanding why it works—you're just asking for difficult-to-find bugs if you do this. Do your homework and find code...