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

Making sense of complicated blueprints


Now that we have the basics working, let's do some digging and understand how this class was built. You should find, as we do this, that many of the techniques you'll see in this blueprint will make more sense as a result of the work you've done so far in this book.

The techniques we're going to explore here are valuable. If you work professionally in software development, or even if you work as a hobbyist, sooner or later, you're going to encounter an existing piece of code and you're going to need to figure out how it works. We're going to guide you through a few strategies to make this a far less-daunting task than it might at first seem.

Let's get to it:

  1. Open Content/VRExpansion/Vive, and find the Vive_PawnCharacter blueprint. Open it up.
  2. Open its Event Graph.

Yikes! There's a lot of stuff in here.

The example project's Vive_PawnCharacter Blueprint contains a lot of Blueprint code. Digging through it isn't as daunting as it may seem at first.

Here's the...