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 2. Setting Up Your Development Environment

The goalof this chapter is to get you set up to develop in Unreal Engine. Even if you've already installed and started working in the engine, you may still find it worthwhile to take a look through this chapter, as there are a few details of the installation process that might be useful to you.

We're also going to take a look at the Epic Games launcher. It's easy to get into the habit of looking at it just as a way of updating the engine and launching projects, but there's a huge collection of useful resources for learning and development there too. It would be a mistake to ignore them.

For those planning to develop for mobile VR on Oculus Go or Samsung Gear, we'll walk you through the process of setting up the Android SDK and setting up a project for deployment to the device, and finally for those interested in C++ development, we'll show you how to set up Visual Studio 2017 for use with Unreal and for those interested in working on the bleeding...