Image detection worked for me 4.22, 4.23, 4,24.
The default template’s debug menu shows them via Show Planes. Images are shown as planes with their „friendly name“.
You can test images in XCode, it will evaluate how suitable an image is for tracking.
But apart from that, oh boy… what an ordeal. AR is only for the brave, never had this many issues for desktop or VR projects.
Using 4.22 on MacOS comes with more problems, some things to watch out for:
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if you follow the setup guide of the documentation, the camera image looks dark and gritty. That’s a bug. MobileHDR has to be enabled in the projects render settings. Affects all version from 4.22 to latest release.
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With 4.22 on Mac, make sure the path to your project has no empty space.
It mistakes an empty space as the end of the path and the rest of the path as an argument.
So if your project is in „/user/Unreal Projects/Projectname“ , the log will give warnings, „/user/Unreal“ does not exist and „Projects/Projectname“ is an invalid argument. This can also affect DDC and dragndrop import of assets among other things. -
Save often, occasional crashes when moving folders in the content browser.
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If you use XCode10 and your ios device is up to date, you cannot deploy to the device. So you need to use latest XCode to deploy an .ipa file.
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in case you have Visual Studio for Mac and newer Mono installed, you need to uninstall, because otherwise the UE4Editor does not find any provisioning profiles or certificates, also manually adding these does not work.
command+alt+esc will become part of your workflow with UE4.22. (I thought that is more of a windows thing.)
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4.22 often gets stuck at launch (splash screen) when compiling shaders. If users seek out help about this issue they are usually told to just wait until compiling finishes, but no, the editor does not eventually open.
To find out whether it really is compiling or stuck, you can hear the fans spinning slower (this sounds so archaic) and then check MacOS Activity Monitor if there are Shadercompiler at work. If not, it finished but the editor did not notice. You could wait years with nothing happening. Kill UE4 with command+alt+esc and start again. -
if you use 4.22, you have to use XCode10. Whenever you start 4.23 or later you have to remember to switch via terminal command XCode version shares will recompile for quite a while, because different XCode version. If you forget, kill UE4 command+alt+esc and open again, because the UE4 splash screen has no abort/cancel button.
Github shows big code changes for ARKit in 4.25, let’s hope for the best. But so far every release also came with new bugs. There is obviously no testing process going on. Image detection is currently broken for ARCore in 4.24 Unreal Engine Issues and Bug Tracker (UE-87102)
So there is a chance of 4.25 with fixed ARkit camera but broken ARCore image recognition. It just never ends…
Bugs can always happen, but constantly breaking features for over a full year now is something else.
ARKit and ARCore are evidently in experimental status. Is it marketing pressuring it as usable in production? This hurts the reputation of an otherwise great engine.