CREATING FOR VR: CONTINUED

fidelity without increasing polygon counts or material complexity. Players have complete freedom to get as close to your assets as they like, so repeating dense normal maps blended into your metals, paints, and concretes will add a lot of believability. Unreal Engine 4 offers great Level of Details (LOD) and optimisation tools to help achieve these finer details.

10. introduce different heights

Take advantage of different player ground heights and building scales. When executed properly, you’ll actually be able to make the player feel a sense of vertigo in VR when looking off the edge of a building. For example, in Robo Recall’s map, we added glass awnings at the edges of buildings. So not only does the player then feel like they are on the edge of a building, but they also get a sense that they are barely grounded at the top of the city. Glass is something very easy to get looking good in Unreal Engine 4. You now need to use only a couple of material nodes, whereas previously developers would really have to work at this effect to get it looking realistic!

11. Use interactive Props

Filling spaces with interactive clutter is a great technique to add extra levels of depth to the player’s experience. Consider using objects such as mugs, cans and pieces of rubbish such as old food or discarded tissues. We had great fun picking up trash in Robo Recall and putting it in a trash can… over and over again. The Unreal Engine Marketplace is filled with many great examples of these assets, all of which help to facilitate immersion in any VR experience.