Introduction to the VR Expansion Plugin (Setup and Features) - Unreal Engine 5

now i've talked about the vr expansion plug-in quite a bit in the past and even done quite a few tutorials on the vr expansion plug-in specifically and with unreal engine 5 having recently released in early access i thought now would be a great time to revisit not only the installation of the vr expansion plug and how to get it all set up but also go over why even in unreal engine 5 the vr expansion plug-in is still a great plug-in to have in any vr project that you are looking to build so before we go ahead and jump into all of this if you enjoy the video and you want to see more like this go ahead and hit the like and subscribe button down below it lets me know that you guys want to see even more videos like this and let me also know in the comments below if you would like to see any vr expansion plug-in tutorials in unreal engine 5 and if so what kind of plug-in tutorials would you guys like to see go and leave that down below and with that let's go ahead and jump right into the video alright so first things first i want to start with the overall installation and setup of the vr expansion plug-in now if you've ever set up any kind of plug-in or anything it's really the same general idea both an unreal engine 4 as well as a non-real engine 5. i'm going to go through the whole process anyways um so to start out the first thing you're going to do is of course get to the vr expansion plugin this is actually stored on a github repository you can actually find this in github it's actually not that difficult if you actually look up either more than troll or vr or vr expansion plugin you should be able to find it i'm also be leaving a link to this repository down below if you'd like to go ahead and just click on the link down there so what i'm going to do is actually go ahead and click down on this branch i'm actually going to go down into unreal engine 5 pre-release this will just make sure that we are in fact compatible with unreal engine 5 and we're not going to have any kind of issues when trying to run this in unreal engine 5. so with that out of the way we'll go ahead and download the zip and i'm just going to go and save this it shouldn't take you very long it's not a particularly long zip file but i'll go ahead and minimize that and we'll go ahead and open up our downloads folder and go and extract that here and you now have the whole plugin that we need for the vr expansion plugin uh so i actually already have a project set up that i'm actually going to want to use with this um so i'm actually going to go ahead and go and open that up and we actually don't yet have a plugins folder so if you don't have a plugins folder all you have to do is quite simply add one it unreal engine will automatically detect it when you reopen this project so i'll actually go ahead and click on folder plugins and i'm just going to go ahead and drop this full this whole vr expansion plug-in folder right into our plugins folder within our project that we have open and we actually don't need the zip folder anymore so i'm actually going to close that as well now once we go ahead and open up this project you'll actually get a little prompt right here saying that the following modules are missing or built with a different engine version and it actually specifies as well the open vr expansion plug-in the vr expansion plug-in and the vr expansion editor would you like to rebuild them now of course we're going to want to go ahead and hit yes this will actually go ahead and enable our plug-ins as well once we have the project open and this will take some time so you do just want to let it run and once we have this open though we'll have the vr expansion plug-in fully ready to go so i'll just go and let this run and i'll be right back in a second all right with that that is actually all that we need in order to actually get the plug installed if you want to verify that the vr expansion plug-in is actually installed we can actually go right over here into plug-ins and if i actually click on install you can actually see we have openvr expansion plug-in which is enabled uh open xr expansion plug-in which actually isn't enabled but that's not going to make too big of a difference here as well as the vr expansion plug-in which is the big thing that i was looking for here which is in fact enabled um so as i said it's really simple if you install any kind of plug-in in either unreal engine 4 or unreal engine 5 it's the same exact process now i want to go over real quick why this is such a great plugin to have even still in unreal engine 5. and i actually want to start actually with the player so if we actually go ahead and create let me go ahead and find it here there should be a vr character which should be here near the bottom there it is and i actually want to compare this real quick with the vr pawn because there is quite a significant difference here and let me see your blueprints and vr pawn now the first big thing you're going to notice is this giant capsule that we have here in the vr character the capsule actually does follow the player around as they move around within their play space which isn't something that the vr pawn does at all when you first boot this up so you do already have that basic collision enabled the only thing that the capsule does not do on the vr character is it does not rescale based off of your height or whether or not you're crouching or fully standing so you do kind of need to configure that if you want to be able to reposition the capsule height but other than that it is the collision is probably very significant it is a very significant change for the vr character and we can actually go ahead and look in here too we also already have a mesh which is actually tied to just the underside of the camera which we can actually use for any sort of body if we want to do any sort of collisions or anything like that uh vr replicated camera which is as i said our camera and it's actually replicated as well which is actually great if you plan on doing any sort of multiplayer functionality that's actually a huge perk of using anything within the vr expansion plug-in is it's already pretty much pre-rigged to be able to use any sort of multiplayer functionality and already replicate movement uh all that kind of stuff and then of course we have the left and right motion controllers and also the vr movement reference which is another big thing and i've actually made a very quick uh tutorial as well which i'll actually leave linked right here on adding locomotion movement to a to your own vr game because the thing is the vr pawn does not support any sort of locomotion movement there are basically two ways in order to enable that within the vr pawn either one you have to add in your own sort of gravity as well as locomotion movement or you have to create a whole new character and then use the vr movement within that which can be a little bit of an annoyance fortunately the vr character from the vrx manager plug-in does have this all enabled right out of the box so you don't have to worry about whether or not you'll be able to use locomotion movement or going around configuring it anything like that which is really great now a couple of the things that the vr expansion plugin adds in that i think are really great to have in most if not every vr project let me actually go ahead and open up the vr pawn here because i believe they are all components so if i actually go ahead and open up a vr pawn so first thing that actually caught my attention to the vr expansion plug in the first place is gestures so vr expansion plugin does support gestures and gesture recognition which is really amazing i i have actually used the gesture recognition system um and it does work very well it it does work really well as well as at detecting gestures which is really amazing so if you're doing any sort of gesture recognition or anything like that i would definitely suggest checking this out because this is a probably one of the best implementations that i found for gesture recognition as well and then the other thing which is something you will most likely use in your vr project are things like buttons sliders and i believe it calls it i believe they're called dials if i recall yes vr dials um which i'll do exactly as what the name implies so the dial will actually spin in place and probably honestly isn't best to use in a player if i'm honest uh but a dial will actually allow for you to spin a mesh in place a slider will allow for you to slide uh a mesh back and forth in place as well as get a value from that slider and then you also have buttons as well which is also very amazing and i have done a tutorial on sliders and buttons in the past as well and levers as well levers are also very nice to have as well now you're probably not going to end up using all of those within the the all these from the vr expansion plugin but they are as i said very great to use uh in addition we also just have a whole bunch of alternative skeletal mesh static mesh um all all these kinds of stuff which are honestly really great to have for the simple reason that they are all meant to be replicated for multiplayer use which is as i said very amazing he also has some bass scriptable actors and components which allow for you to very easily implement in grippable objects rather than using the vr templates default stuff um so this is all really nice to use now if you're looking at building any sort of vr game i would highly suggest checking out this plugin as i said it is an amazing plugin to use it is really fantastic even if it's just for the player i find that the vr character from the vrx expansion plug-in works much better than the vr pawn that you get out of the vr template even in unreal engine 5. i know that they've made quite a few improvements and i have said that but it just quite frankly doesn't it quite frankly still isn't perfect to use so i would definitely suggest checking it checking it out and if you're also looking at implementing any of the features gesture recognition sliders buttons any of that like i had mentioned or multiplayer work i would again recommend checking this out because the vr expansion plug-in does implement all these features very well so with that if you guys enjoyed this video and you guys want to see more like this go ahead and hit the like and subscribe button down below and with that i will see you guys in the next reality thank you so much to my patreon supporters boomboxzed 9x and shaya

Channel: VR Playground

Views: 2,941

Keywords: VR Playground, VR, Virtual Reality, Game Development, unreal engine 5 tutorial beginner vr, unreal engine virtual reality, unreal engine vr, unreal engine vr tutorial, unreal engine, unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 vr, ue5 vr, unreal 5 vr, unreal engine 5 vr tutorial, vr ex, vr expansion plugin, vr expansion plugin tutorial, unreal vr tutorial, vr expansion plugin unreal engine 5, vr expansion plugin good, intro vr expansion plugin, vr expansion plugin setup and features

Id: Jj1wNxeAWRM

Length: 10min 57sec (657 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 09 2021