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

Playing movies in Unreal Engine


We're going to begin by learning how we can play movies and other media in Unreal Engine in general. Of course, to get started, we're going to need a movie to play.

Video files come in a confusing array of configurations, and there are a few things you should know about them.

Understanding containers and codecs

The first point of confusion most people run into when they start learning about video files is not understanding that the container that a video file is wrapped in doesn't necessarily tell you much about how it was encoded. Let's take a moment to talk about this.

 

Video files consist of a lot of information, all packed into one file. There's the stream of images representing the video track. Often, there's audio, sometimes there are subtitles, and sometimes there's other additional information as well. All of this information gets bundled together inside a wrapping format called a container. You've no doubt seen video files with the .mp4 extension. That...