Unreal for Mobile and Standalone VR: Create Professional VR Apps Without Coding

ISBN-13: 9781484243596 / Angielski / Miękka / 2019 / 324 str.

Cornel Hillmann

Spis treści

Foreword and a bit of Unreal and VR history.

Chapter summary: A quick summary on how VR and the Unreal engine evolved over time and why VR is a key technology for the future.

Chapter 1. The VR ecosystem and What to Expect in the Years to Come

Chapter summary: A look at the VR ecosystem, the technologies, manufacturers and platforms and their market shares. What the emerging trends in VR are. What social VR, WebVR, haptic feedback

and new display technologies mean for development. How to see VR and AR as complimentary

technologies under the umbrella of XR.

• Standalone and Mobile VR vs. tethered VR

• Use cases for businesses and entertainment

• XR: The benefits of VR vs AR

Chapter 2. VR Production Tools, Workflow and Pipeline

Chapter summary: An introduction to established workflow for creating VR assets. A quick look at Blender 3D, Substance painter and other asset creation tools. A quick look at VR video from 360 to VR180 and how it ties in with real-time graphics. A quick overview why Unreal is such a fantastic tool for VR production, looking at the key features. The importance of audio, especially spatial audio for VR. An introduction on photogrammetry techniques for VR, such as baking high polygon scanned object down to low poly VR assets. What volumetric video means for the future of VR video production and an overview over VR UX topics such as locomotion, UI, and best practices in general.

• 3D modeling, texturing and animation options for producing VR content

• Why is the Unreal engine so great?

• How to combine VR video (360 or VR 180) with real-time graphics

• Emerging techniques: Photogrammetry and volumetric video

• Terminology, UX and best practices for VR.

Chapter 3. Before you start

Chapter summary: How to plan a production. Using game development standards such as GDD as a foundation. The benefits of using great concept art. How to classify assets and optimize production time.

• Game Design Document (GDD) and production planing

• The concept stage

• Asset production

Chapter 4. Unreal for VR: Basic Ingredients for an Oculus Go Project Set-Up

Chapter summary: An introduction over the core concepts in Unreal for VR independent of any target platform. Activating the target platforms VR support, using Game modes and blueprints to load levels. Smooth locomotion vs teleportation. Basic controller mapping and standard controller functions. Established UI concepts, notes on text in VR and deployment to target platforms.

• Basic project setup

• Blueprint interactions

• Locomotion concepts

• Controller concepts

• UI challenges

• Testing and optimization setup

Chapter 5. Comparing the Gear GV, Oculus Go and Oculus Guest

Chapter summary: The Oculus Go and the Gear VR run apps that binary compatible, but there are

important differences. An overview over hardware market-share and performance limitations on older

Samsung phones for the Gear VR. Setting up your device for VR development. Overheating

considerations in game design and example use cases. Side-loading: How to bypass the Oculus store if

you are developing B2B apps for events. Tip & tricks to maximize performance and visual quality.

• Hardware overview and setup

• Oculus store requirements and what they mean

• Analyzing the market and dissecting success stories

• Side-loading for VR B2B apps

• Tips and tricks

Chapter 6. Creating an Interactive VR Presentation

Chapter summary: The first tutorial project is visualization presentation which is typical for a B2B project such as an experience that could be presented at a company convention booth to demonstrate a new product in VR using pop-ups and event triggers. The focus here is on optimizing the visual quality with various light-mapping optimization techniques and getting the most out of the material editor for an optimized visual quality. The tutorial goes step by step through setting up the project, importing the assets, setting up lighting, mapping the controller, designing the event triggers with blueprints, optimizing and deploying the project to Android.

• Project setup

• Setting up a VR pawn

• Importing assets

• Input mapping

• Input actions

• UI setup

• Setting up materials in Unreal

• Lighting in Unreal

• Lightmap optimizations

• Setting up the controller as a laser pointer

• Setting up navigation and teleportation

• Designing the interaction with blueprints

• Triggering animations and audio events

• Monitoring, testing and optimizations

Chapter 7. An Introduction to Creating VR Game Mechanics 

Chapter summary: The second tutorial has a stronger focus on designing blueprint interactions and game-play by following the popular escape room puzzle formula: The player is in a room and needs to find the keys to be able to unlock the door to escape. Once outside he encounters an enemy that he needs to disable to clear the level. The tutorial covers setup, assets imports, materials, lighting, UI and VR controls and goes into designing game-play with blueprints, including the setup of an enemy character. It covers, setting up an inventory system, a navigation mesh, enemy AI, and continues into testing, optimization and deployment to Android.

• Concept, Setup, input and UI

• Setting up collectible items and an inventory system

• Setup and working with test modes

• Setting up the navigation mesh and collisions

• Working with UMG widgets

• Using the UE4 sequencer for cut-scenes

• Working with blueprint device activations

• setting up enemy animations and AI behavior

• Designing the game-play with blueprint logic

• Deployment to Android

Chapter 8. Performance, Profiling and Optimizations

Chapter summary: This chapter is dedicated to strategies dealing with performance issues. It covers the most common reasons for performance loss and offers techniques on how to avoid them. The section goes over the different tools that Unreal offers to analyze your scene and how to profile your apps performance and last but not least getting it ready for deployment and distribution.

• Draw calls, ticks and poly counts

• Unreal's performance and profiling tool-set

• Testing and app distribution

Chapter 9. Conclusion and Resources

Chapter summary: The last chapter summarizes how Mobile VR and standalone VR development is different to tethered VR development, what to consider when porting to different platforms and reflects on the benefits of portable VR, plus it lists important web resources for tutorials and other VR development resources.

O autorze

Cornel Hillmann is a CG artist, virtual reality developer and entrepreneur. Cornel began his career as an art director in Los Angeles after receiving a diploma in computer graphics from Platt College, Alhambra, California. He then launched the companies CNT Media GmbH in Hamburg, Germany, and Emerging Entertainment Pte. Ltd. in Singapore. Cornel also produced the DVD lineup of cgartist.com, which originally started as an artist boot camp and is now his home base for VR- and CG-related projects. Over the last years Cornel has lectured on the subjects of character animation, design and virtual reality and often contributes to interactive media-related events as a panel member or speaker. Cornel is currently leveraging his skills and experience in CG and media design to develop VR projects.

Blurb

Apply the techniques needed to build VR applications for mobile and standalone head-mounted displays (HMDs) using the Unreal Engine. This book covers the entire VR ecosystem including production tools, Unreal engine, workflows, performance and optimization, and presents two fully-developed projects to reinforce what you've learned. 

Gear VR, the Oculus Go and other Android based VR HMDs are becoming exciting new platforms for immersive business presentations, entertainment and educational solutions. The Unreal engine, one of the world’s most powerful and popular game engines, is now free to use and has become increasingly popular for real-time visualizations and enterprise solutions in recent years.

With Unreal's powerful blueprint visual scripting system, non-coders can now design blueprints in Unreal, unlock the power of rapid prototyping, and create complex interactions without a line of code. Get your copy of Unreal for Mobile and Standalone VR today and begin using this powerful tool-set to create high-end VR apps for a wide range of applications from games, B2B, to education.