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 a Blueprint Interface for pickup objects


To create a Blueprint Interface, follow the given steps:

  1. Right-click in your project's Blueprints directory, and select Create Advanced Asset | Blueprints | Blueprint Interface:
  1. Name it BPI_PickupActor.

When you open it up, you'll see that it contains a Functions list, and nothing else. You'll notice that the graph can't be edited. This is because the interface is simply a list of functions that the attached object must implement, but those functions don't get written in the interface.

  1. By default, it's created a new function declaration for you. Name it Pickup.
  2. Under the function's Details | Inputs, add a new input. Set its type to Scene Component | Object Reference, and name it AttachTo:
  1. Add another function, and call it Drop. This one doesn't need any input.
  2. Compile, save, and close the interface.

Now, let's apply this new interface to BP_PickupCube:

  1. Open BP_PickupCube, and hit the Class Settings item on the toolbar.
  2. Under Details | Interfaces, hit...