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

Additional useful tools


Before we move on from this chapter, let's take a quick moment to talk about other tools you may want to set up to work with Unreal. None of these will be required by the projects in this book, but they're worth knowing about, so you need to know where to look when you need them.

A good robust text editor

Notepad just isn't going to cut it when you need to edit large text files or replace a lot of text in a file. We recommend that you set up a dedicated text editor for this purpose. Here are a few options:

  • Visual Studio Code (https://code.visualstudio.com/) is a powerful, lightweight text editor that supports lots of languages and contains a number of useful text-editing tools. It's free.
  • Sublime Text (https://www.sublimetext.com/) is a highly customizable editor with tons of custom integrations for various languages. It is $80, with a free trial.
  • Atom (https://atom.io/) is a relatively new editor made by GitHub that supports tons of additional package installers for just...