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

We’re not alone – adding an AI character


Creating an AI-controlled character from scratch would take us into areas that fall outside the scope of this book, so, instead, we're going to repurpose the standard player character from the third-person template and change the way it's controlled. 

If you already have a project created using the third-person template available, open it up. If not, create one:

  • Select File | New Project, and create a new Blueprint project using the third-person template. It's fine to leave other settings at their default values – they won't affect anything we're doing.

Migrating the third-person character blueprint

Whether we've taken an existing third-person template project or created a new one, what we want to do now is migrate the ThirdPersonCharacter blueprint:

  1. In the third-person project's content browser, navigate to Content/ThirdPersonBP/Blueprints and select the ThirdPersonCharacter blueprint.
  2. Right-click and select Asset Actions | Migrate. Migrate the character...