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

Seamless locomotion


If you're making an immersive game or experience, that experience is going to be much more convincing to the player if their sense of the space around them isn't constantly being broken up by teleport actions. Let's take a look at a way to handle seamless locomotion in space.

Setting up inputs for seamless locomotion

Ordinarily, we would probably allow users to select the sort of locomotion scheme they're comfortable with in an options menu, but since our current character doesn't do anything but move around, and we haven't done anything with the left controller yet, we can use it to drive our seamless locomotion scheme.

Let's add a pair of input axis mappings for the left controller's thumbstick:

  1. Open Project Settings | Engine | Input.
  2. Hit the + button beside Bindings | Axis Mappings twice to add two new axis mappings.
  3. Name them MoveForward, and MoveRight.
  4. Bind MoveForward to MotionController (L) Thumbstick Y.
  5. Set its Scale to -1.0.
  1. Bind MoveRight to MotionController (L) Thumbstick...