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

Building Unreal from source code


Note

You absolutely do not need to download source code and build the engine from scratch for almost anything you'll realistically be doing with it. This section is included here so that you have the freedom to make engine changes if you ever need to, but you can safely skip this. It's rare even for professional developers to work from the bleeding edge source.

This next section is even more optional than the previous. You'll only ever need to do this if you intend to modify the behavior of the engine itself, or if you want to work with a feature that's so new that it hasn't yet been bundled into one of the releases. That's another part of the beauty of this engine though—if you really need it to do something it doesn't already do, you can make the changes yourself. Also, if you make changes that improve the engine or might be useful to other developers, you can use GitHub to contribute your changes to Epic. Lots of developers do, and the net effect of it is...