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

Summary


This was another involved chapter. We did a lot here. We began by creating a new project and migrating our VRPawn blueprints, along with their required objects, into the new project. We learned a quick way of recreating input bindings by copying the contents of DefaultInput.ini to a new project. We then added the Soul:City assets and maps to our project and set up a navmesh so that we could explore it.

Then, we got to the meat of this chapter. We scavenged a hand mesh from the VR Template project and created a Blueprint class to drive their behavior. We learned how to use construction scripts to change objects when they're created, both in the editor and in-game. We learned how to create child actor components inside our pawn and how to use them in blueprints. We learned how to create an animation blend space and an animation blueprint to animate our hand meshes and how to use an enumerator to pass state information into the animation blueprint.

In the next chapter, we're going to...