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

Adding a UI indicator to the companion pawn


Now that our character is moving through the world, we're going to give it another behavior state and allow the player to instruct it to wait.

Before we create this new state, however, we're first going to create a simple UI element to indicate the companion character's current state. We'll build it as a placeholder first, since we haven't yet created its new state, and then, once we have, we'll update it to reflect the real underlying data.

Creating a UI widget using UMG

Unreal provides a powerful tool for constructing UI elements. UMG allows developers to lay out UI elements on a visual layout tool, and to tie Blueprint behaviors directly to the objects in the layout. We call UI elements widgets. Let's learn how to create them:

  1. In your project's Content directory, right-click to create a new asset. Select UI | Widget Blueprint:
  1. Name it WBP_CompanionIndicator and open it up.

 

You'll be presented with the UMG UI Designer.

Note

Unreal offers two toolsets...