, Lauren, and Yannick are coming on to the livestream to discuss the new improvements that went into VR Mode just before GDC. During the State of Unreal keynote, and Lauren got to do some hands-on demonstrations live on stage, but now the team behind the tech is here to discuss the updates in detail. The full release of these updates to VR Mode is not far away, but these changes are available now on GitHub for you to check out!
Feel free to ask any questions on the topic in the thread below, and remember, while we try to give attention to all inquiries, it’s not always possible to answer’s questions as they come up. This is especially true for off-topic requests, as it’s rather likely that we don’t have the appropriate person around to answer. Thanks for understanding!
I’ve built and tried the new editor, and its looking great. i would love to have the ability to pick up a nearby object and have it attached to the controller for minor rotational adjustments (with smart snapping maybe) and placement. Has this been discussed internally?
Just watched the stream and was wondering if the demo was in the github version or not?
I know you said it wouldn’t be released officially but it seems a shame not to considering how good it was at showing off all the new features.
The one im most looking forward to is the new water effects as ue4 currently has rather plastic looking water. Any idea when we’ll be able to take advantage of those effects?
There is some it could be a real game project one day. I do not want to release it though as just an example because I put in lots of work trying to make it a real project, mostly from home.
The water itself is gerstner waves. Anybody can create any of this, no code was used. It’s all just materials. The only really custom parts were the caustics which I made in UE4 and described pretty in depth in my gdc talk here:
But even the caustics were just a fairly straightforward implementation using Snell’s Law. Only really custom part was making it run fast-ish in ue4 for texture creation, and the chromatic aberration technique.
Gerstner waves are very well researched and there are tons of ue4 projects you can get. A free community one floats around (I can’t remember what its called though), plus there are versions on the ue4 marketplace. Jerry Tessendorf’s paper tells you everything you need to know:
(The link is acting up but you can find lots of articles and simple tutorials on gerstner waves so I don’t think I will have much to add there).
Also it started as a personal project but in the last few months I have had some help from other Epic people on a very part time basis. Tommy Jacob - robo-recall producer - has been meeting with me and playtesting on a somewhat weekly basis and helping me with design and focus. Zak Belica shared a bunch of beach audio, that he happened to record on his vacation to Hawaii. But I haven’t had time to really use the audio very well yet so that will be fun to get back to when current stuff finishes up. Also for the version shown in GDC, had help with lighting and sky from Sumanaseni.
At some point I will be releasing a big Content Plugin that includes lots of examples from my talk. That will include the Hitmask, Flowmap Painting, Caustics (but NOT the ocean itself, it will generate caustics from input water normal maps), 2d and 3d Fluid Simulation, and BP space coordinate conversions.