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

Creating a project to house our plugin


Let's begin by creating a new blank project:

  1. Create a new Blueprint project using the Blank template, and set its hardware target to Mobile / Tablet, and its graphics target to Scalable 3D or 2D, No starter content.

Installing the VRExpansion plugin

Once we've created our project, we're going to add the VRExpansion plugin to it.

The first thing we need to do before we can install any plugin to our project is create a place to put it. Plugins must live in a directory named Plugins in your project directory or in the Engine directory:

  1. Open the directory containing your new project file. You should see your .uproject file here, along with your Config and Content directories.
  2. Create a new directory here named Plugins:

Now that we've created a Plugins directory for our project, let's add the VRExpansion plugin to it. There are a few ways we can do this.

 

Installing using precompiled binaries

The easiest way to get the plugin is to navigate to its forum discussion...