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

Creating hands


Now that we have a scene to work with, let's get to the meat of this chapter and start setting up some interaction.

Before we do anything else, let's improve the way we're representing the motion controllers in the scene. Currently, we're using debug meshes, which won't render correctly if our user is using a different headset from the one we used when we authored the scene. It was good enough to get us going, but now we need to replace it with something more permanent.

To get a hand mesh we can use, we're going to raid the VR Template. It's likely that, for many of your VR projects, you'll simply begin by creating a project based on the VR Template, or you'll migrate the entire MotionController Pawn Blueprint into a project you've created, but for our purposes here, we want to build the pawn ourselves so that we understand what's in it.

Migrating hand meshes and animations from the VR Template project

If you already have an example of the VR Template project created, use File...