Hello everyone, long story short: I am an avid UE4 enthusiast and I am on a budget.
I can not really afford both a vive and a gpu to make it run and start to experiment with it.
Looking around for a knock off my only option seems this promising device, the Pimax 4k. It costs a fraction of a Vive and that means I could squeeze in a 1070 gpu or even a 1080 and some more ram I need for less than the vive cost!!.
My first question naturally is: Will it work with the editor?? Sadly the word Pimax gives zero results on the ue4 Forums. (send me there if I am wrong please). I went then on the manifacturer forums and someone said it no longer works past version 4.12 of the editor :((
All the info gathered at this point are:
The device is seen from steam VR as an oculus.
It has no head tracking or controllers but has responsive giroscopes (many reported a drift that has to be reset now and then)
It has a HIGHER resolution than the vive and that means no screen door effect and less pixellation, It works at 60 hz only.
That is all I really needed for my projects: good resolution and a xbox controller will be fine for a long while.
Messing with the sdk myself is out of my league and I am really worried at this point that my “VR developer dream” will probably not happen anytime soon! I am willing to do the eavy lifting myself but it could be a year+ long detour from the stuff I am really interested in (I feel I am barely progressing already tbh hehe)
So if anyone of you out there own the device and can confirm is compatible ( like… with blueprint nodes and all) I would really apreciate your feedback! Lets get this ball rolling! In the meanwhile I ll keep saving and learning.
Hello everyone, is me again! the random solo indie vr developer on a budget!
The price of the pimax went down even further so after some more research I decided to take the risk and spend all I could on a nice 1080 msi gpu and a pimax 4k (total cost around 900 euros inclidung shipping and extra stick of 8gm ram) I could not afford any other hmd so I can not make any comparison but overall I am very happy with the device.
Most important aspects are the AMAZING 2560x1440 resolution (next to zero SDE! @60 hz tho) of the display and his out of the box full compatibility with steamvr and Unreal engine( 4.15 working great with steamvr pluggin). So all my fears of getting the chinese sdk to work and read the gyroscopes data and all that stuff has been taken care of already to my great relief and joy!
Main focus of my research will be now to really optimize my work for that demanding of a resolution. It will be good practice I guess, cose this device is a glimpse of the challange of what next gen VR will bring and I think me and any other VR developer will have to master any trick available to keep those fps above the refresh rate all the time. On the other side, if it works on this device, any project will run super smooth at lower resolution of any other current hmd pc setup!
Once again eveerything works so far better than expected. The best version of the device drivers is the 1.1.92 I belive. Atm any newer version has some kind of reprojection issue that causes lesser visual quality so keep that in mind if you go for this device, not to let the drivers update past that version and you are good to go!
Good luck everyone and thanks to Epic for all the efforts, hopefully some day I ll be able to give something back!
Yeah lets get the ball rolling! At the moment working on this project.
/
Its based on the oculus CV1 but I am ready for higher resolutions (will buy a extra 1080 :0)
Let me know how you progress.
greetings.
Quick tip to get High frame rates (90). minimum alphas (grass, leaves enlarge shader complexety (press f5).
Launch game from the command prompt (if you have plugins and hate compiling). Add this to your shortcut:
“C:\Program Files\Epic Games\UE_4.16\Engine\Binaries\Win64\UE4Editor.exe” “D:\back_up’s\levels_12\mooi_1.uproject”-game
Nice vid, you got a lot going on there! I ll give your settings a try. Indeed forward rendering is the way to go. My levels are pretty empty atm so I can get away with dynamic lighting only. I know that is a mistake and it will come around and bite me in the ■■■ sooner or later fps whise. My excuse is that I hate doing UV mappings and Baking the lights = 2x the Uv work. I am not sure how everyone else pipeline works exactly but for me… It take 4x times the time and effort to UV an asset “decently” that actually doing the asset itself! The UV pluggin from Zbrush is great but not so great for Lightmaps and I feel there is always something else more interesting to explore at the stage I am at.
My target fps is 60 and so far so good, keeping that poli count low is key and this guy here is my master https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7WjLLlbG7oc12kmknbq20g. Go check him out, I learned a lot on hard surface sculpting thanks to him. I am working only with my assets for now, having a mashup of different styles is really not an option but I am going way off topic now.
Some update on the Pimax4k… the new drivers are a lot better and got more stable with full support of Nolo vr https://www.nolovr.com/ there you go Motion tracking! ( tbh ppl on the pimax forums are not so happy about the controllers so I think I ll pass for now) One thing to keep in mind is that, since my first post, vr prices for oculus and vive dropped a bit, that means that when you add up the pimax + the nolo cost… It is just marginally cheaper now. That said I used the device for a while and I really like it. Works well with ue4+ xbox controller, 3d movies looks great. A friend came at my place and tested the pimax. He loved the display resolution but noticed the smaller FoV compared to the Vive. I never even tought about FoV but I think is factor worth mentioning.
Hello! I understand it works? Did you buy primax 4k vr? Have you trouble with drivers on primax 4k? Does it work in realtime in engine, or you need to compile build everytime for test you level, textures, etc… and last question - does you game would be supported htc vive, if you create it on primax 4k, or it have additional sdk/drivers (i don`t know) to you build for support you game and htc vive and primax vr? Thanks!
It does work with UE4. There was a bump in 4.18 while they were transitioning with resolution standards so I kept using 4.17 till they fixed all in 4.19. No need to compile or anything.
Steam VR will open every time you open the editor (sometime your browser will do that too) I suggest you create a text file as follow: