Epic Games unveiled a new addition to the Unreal Editor that will be coming out later this year that the company said will be a huge benefit to level designers for VR games and experiences. Epic Games’ Founder and CEO, Tim Sweeney, and Mike Fricker, the company’s Technical Director, joined Sr. Community Manager Chance Ivey on Epic Games’ weekly community Twitch stream to reveal an incredible new development for Unreal Editor. Sweeney announced that the Unreal Editor will soon work in VR.
Unreal Editor VR won’t be an add-on with limited features, though. Sweeney said that the goal is to eventually have the entire editor available within virtual reality. The company is prioritizing the most relevant features to implement first by considering the value that bringing the feature into VR will add to the experience and ease of use, but with time, the founder wants to see the whole editor working.
During the Twitch stream, Nick Donaldson, Sr Designer at Epic Games, gave a live demonstration of Unreal Editor running in VR. The demo included how to move around within the environment and how to use the menus, and he quickly built a structure to show how easy and quick working in the editor can be.
Moving and manipulating the space that you are in involves clicking and dragging. You drag the environment around you while you remain stationary. A teleport system similar to that used in Bullet Time is also available.
You can also zoom in and out of the space to scale up and down. This is done with a pinch gesture, similar to how you would pinch to zoom on a tablet. You can zoom in until you are tiny compared to the environment, or you can zoom out to look down on the map as if it were a tabletop game.
Epic Games believes the VR editor will actually improve approachability. “If you want to move something, you just grab it and move it. It’s really natural,” said Fricker. “You don’t have to unlearn or relearn things.” Sweeney noted that he believes that, “Over the next decade, every 3D tool will move into VR. After using this, it’s a pain to go back to a mouse.”
source by: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/epic-unreal-editor-vr,31140.html
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