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

Using the Epic Games launcher


Before we go too much further, let's take a look at the Epic Games launcher—there's a ton of useful material here, and this should be a starting place for much of your learning. It's worth it to take some time to look around and see what resources are available to you. It's easy to overlook these resources, but if you get used to understanding where you can learn and find information when you need it, you'll get much further, much faster.

The launcher's Unreal Engine tab is broken into four major sections:

  • Unreal Engine
  • Learn
  • Marketplace
  • Library

Let's take a look at each of them.

The Unreal Engine Tab

The Unreal Engine tab displays featured content and projects, which are definitely worth exploring, but they'll become more relevant to you as you use the engine longer. As a new user, pay particular attention to that row of icons right under the main banner. These are valuable resources:

The Unreal Engine tab as of Unreal 4.22

  • The News link is a great way to keep up with...