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

Getting started


For this project, we're going to begin by simply taking the previous chapter's project and making a new copy. In previous chapters, we've explored a few ways of creating new projects using material from other projects. Simply duplicating and renaming a project can often be the simplest way to do this, and is appropriate if you're taking the work you've done in a previous project and expanding on it, as we are here. (It's also perfectly reasonable for this chapter's work to keep working from the previous project, if you'd like to.)

 

Creating a new Unreal project from an existing project

When creating a new project by copying, there really isn't a lot that needs to be done. It's enough to simply do the following:

  • Copy the old project directory.
  • Rename the new directory and the .uproject file.
  • Delete the generated files from the old project.

Let's run through this process using our project from Chapter 5, Interacting with the Virtual World – Part I, as a starting point for our work...