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 4. Getting Around the Virtual World

In this chapter, we're going to take the pawn we built in the previous chapter and get it moving through the world. We'll begin with a commonly employed teleport movement scheme and cover a wide range of tasks that go into setting it up. We'll learn about navigation meshes in our environment, how to set up input events in our project and use them in Blueprints, and how to build a player pawn Blueprint and get it moving around the world. Finally, we'll also explore an immersive seamless locomotion scheme that you can use to allow your players to move through the world without teleporting.

Throughout the course of this chapter, we'll be discussing the following topics:

  • Navigation meshes—what they are, how to set them up in your level, and how to refine them
  • How to set up a Blueprint for your player pawn, and how to create input events that your pawn can use
  • How to perform traces, using both straight lines and curves, to find legal target locations in...