Developing content for Virtual Reality (VR) does require a few workflow adjustments to ensure that the user has the best VR experience possible. The purpose of this guide is to help point out some of the main things that you should be aware of when developing content for your VR projects.

VR Project Settings

When creating a new project for VR, whether the project is Blueprint based or C++ based, it is best to create a project that uses the Mobile / Tablet option with Scalable 3D or 2D graphics and No Starter Content to ensure that your VR project will be running at frame right from the start.

VR .INI Settings

The following .INI settings were taken from the UE4 powered, VR demo, Showdown. These . INIsettings, if used, should be added to your project's Config\DefaultEngine.INI file, under SystemSettings.

[SystemSettings] vr.PixelDensity=1 r.SeparateTranslucency=0 r.HZBOcclusion=0 r.MotionBlurQuality=0 r.PostProcessAAQuality=3 r.BloomQuality=1 r.EyeAdaptationQuality=0 r.AmbientOcclusionLevels=0 r.SSR.Quality=1 r.DepthOfFieldQuality=0 r.SceneColorFormat=2 r.TranslucencyVolumeBlur=0 r.TranslucencyLightingVolumeDim=4 r.MaxAnisotropy=8 r.LensFlareQuality=0 r.SceneColorFringeQuality=0 r.FastBlurThreshold=0 r.SSR.MaxRoughness=0.1 r.rhicmdbypass=0 sg.EffectsQuality=2 sg.PostProcessQuality=0

VR Frame Rate Optimization

Most VR applications implement their own procedures to control the VR frame rate. Because of this, you should disable several general UE4 project settings that can interfere with VR applications.

From the Menu Bar, choose Edit, then Project Settings. Under Engine > General Settings > Framerate: Uncheck Smooth Frame Rate .

Uncheck Use Fixed Frame Rate .

Set Custom Timestep to None .

Click Apply.

VR World Scale

Ensuring the correct scale of your world is one of the most important ways to help deliver the best user experience possible on VR platforms. Having the wrong scale can lead to all kinds of sensory issues for users, and could even result in Simulation

Objects are most easily viewed in VR when they are in a range of 0.75 to 3.5 Meters from the player's camera. Inside of UE4, 1 Unreal Unit (UU) is equal to 1 Centimeter (CM). This means that objects inside of Unreal are best viewed when they are 75 UU to 350 UU away from the player's camera (when using VR).

Distance Distance in Unreal Units(UU) 1 Centimeter 1 Unreal Unit 1 Meter 100 Unreal Units 1 Kilometer 100,000 Unreal Units

You can adjust the scale of your world using the World to Meters variable that is located under World Settings. Increasing or decreasing this number will make the user feel bigger or smaller in relation to the world around them. Assuming your content was built with 1 Unreal Unit = 1 CM, setting World To Meters to 10 will make the world appear to be very big, while setting World To Meters to 1000 will make the world appear to be very small.

VR and Simulation Sickness

Simulation Sickness is a form of motion sickness that occurs when using HMD devices in a VR world. Simulation Sickness can greatly affect a user's VR experience and in some cases, ruin the VR experience all together. To help reduce the likelihood of your user having a bad VR experience, follow the best practices listed below closely. If you do not do this, your users could end up having a very unpleasant VR experience.



You must maintain framerate, and ideally, a little bit of a buffer to make sure you're always over the HMD's native framerate. Low framerates are another trigger for Simulation Sickness, so make sure to optimize your project as much as possible. The following table shows the various HMD's UE4 supports, and the target frame rates your VR project needs to run at on those devices. HMD Device Target Frame Rate DK1 60 FPS DK2 75 FPS Rift Retail 90 FPS Vive 90 FPS Gear VR 60 FPS PSVR Variable up to 120 FPS

Developers make the worst test subjects, because they are often used to using VR devices. Check your game as much as you can, with as many different people as you can, to make sure that you are not causing Simulation Sickness.

Avoid cinematic cameras, or anything that takes control of camera movements away from the player, as this tends to be the biggest culprit of your user having a bad VR experience.

Do Not override the Field of View (FOV) manually, and Do Not expose this to the end user for editing purposes. The value needs to match the physical geometry of the headset and lenses, which should be automatically set through the device's SDK and internal configuration. If there is a mismatch, the world will appear to warp when you turn your head, leading to discomfort or nausea.

Do Not have "Walking Bob" for a camera effect (like in most first person games). Causing the camera to move up and down to mimic the movement of the human body will give player Simulation Sickness, ruin their VR experience.

Do Not "Shake" the camera when trying to relay an event to the player. If a grenade goes off next to a player, a camera shake may make sense in non-VR games, but in VR games, it can trigger Simulation Sickness very quickly.

When you are designing worlds and levels for your VR game, make sure to use dimmer lights and colors than you normally would. Strong and vibrant lighting in VR games can cause Simulation Sickness to occur more quickly. Avoid this by using cooler shades and dimmer lights than you normally would.

Avoid stairs and use lifts instead. When the player is moving quickly, especially up and down stairs, it can be very disorienting.

Players should all start out going full speed and not gradually accelerate to full speed. Also, movement speed should always be at a constant rate of acceleration.

Do Not use Depth of Field or Motion Blur post processes, because they can greatly affect what the user is seeing and, more importantly, they can give the user Simulation Sickness.

Please note that this list is not an exhaustive compilation of root causes for Simulation Sickness; however, it should give you a good idea of what might be causing your players to fall ill while playing your VR game.

VR Camera Setup

How your VR camera is setup in UE4 depends entirely on whether your VR experience is seated or standing. In a seated experience, you will need to artificially raise the camera origin for the character to be standing. However, for a standing experience, you should make sure that the camera origin is at 0 (on the ground). You can achieve either effects by attaching a camera component to a scene component at the base of the character (ground level), or by setting the Eye Height to half of the (negative) Cylinder Height of the collision capsule on the character.

VR Character Settings

The setup for a character using a VR headset is slightly different than for a standard character. Things like character Height, Width, Speed, and Camera Location all need to be slightly modified to accommodate a VR character.



When building objects for a VR world, it is important that you make the scale of your digital object the same as their real world counterpart. Making things bigger or smaller than they are in the real world, can ruin the immersion that you are trying to achieve.

Character Height & Width

Character Height & Width should mimic real life measurements as much as possible. Using sizes that are too big or two small, can ruin the immersion that you are trying to achieve.



Property UE4 Default Recommended VR Height: 192 cm 176 cm Width: 84 cm 68 cm

Movement Speed

VR movement speed is a difficult property to recommend a setting for, because the movement speed that you choose will mainly be determined by the type of experience that you are trying to achieve. For example, in the Elemental VR demo, the movement speed was cut to about 1/4 normal speed.



Property UE4 Default Recommended VR Movement Speed: 60 m/s 24 m/s

Camera Location

The VR camera needs to be positioned slightly lower than the base eye height to compensate for being at the character's eye level.



Property UE4 Default Recommended VR Base Eye Height: 180 cm 160 cm

VR Content Considerations

When creating VR content, remember that users can look at that content from multiple angles. Here are few things that you might have done in the past, but need to avoid in VR:

Scale - The best thing to do about the scale of the objects in your VR world, is to mimic reality as closely as you can. Making objects bigger or smaller than their real world counterparts could lead to confusion or Simulation Sickness.

Missing Polygon Faces - In standard games, it is often acceptable (and preferred) to remove polygon faces from objects that cannot be seen by the player. However, in VR games, players have much more freedom to look around, and this practice can sometimes lead to players being able to see things that they're not supposed to see.

Which Type of Lighting to use - You should always use Static lighting and Lightmaps when making a VR project... this is the cheapest option to render. If you need to use dynamic lighting, make sure to limit the amount of dynamic lights to as few as possible, and make sure that they never touch one another. If you have an outdoor scene, set your directional light to dynamic instead of stationary, and then turn on Cascaded Shadow Maps (CSM); adjusting the settings to be as simple as possible while still giving you shadows.

VR & VFX - Some VFX tricks, like using SubUV Textures to simulate fire or smoke, do not hold up very well when viewed in VR. In many cases you are going to need to use static meshes instead of 2D particles to simulate VFX's like explosions or smoke trails.

Near field effects, or effects that happen very close to the camera, work well in VR, but only when the effects are made up of Static Mesh particles.

VR & Transparency - In 3D graphics, rendering transparency is extremely costly, because transparency will generally have to be re-evaluated per-frame to ensure that nothing has changed. Because of this re-evaluation, rendering Transparency in VR can be so costly, that its cost outweighs its benefits. However, to get around this issue, you can use the DitherTemporalAA Material Function. This Material Function will allow a Material to look like it is using transparency. Also, this will help you avoid common transparency issues, such as self-sorting.

Fake everything you can - Finding clever ways to recreate expensive rendering options, like dynamic shadows or lighting, can be a huge win for hitting your performance goals in VR. In Showdown, having the characters cast dynamic shadows proved to be too expensive per-frame, which meant that dynamic shadows had to be cut from the project. However, this made the characters look like they were floating while moving. To fix this, fake blob shadows were introduced that could dynamically adjust their position and intensity based on how close the character was to an object in the world. This helped give the illusion that a character was casting shadows when they came close to the ground (or other objects).

Known VR Issues

Due to the manner in which HMD's work, some art techniques that are staples of Video Game development, no longer have the impact that they once did. Below, you will find a list of features that might not work as expected in VR, with possible workarounds to address this.

Screen Space Reflections(SSR): While SSR will still work in VR the reflections that they produce could have issues matching up to what it is reflecting in the world. Instead of using SSR use Reflection Probes as they are much cheaper and do suffer less from reflection alignment issues.

Normal Mapping Issues

When viewing Normal maps on objects in VR, you will notice that they do not have the impact that they might have once had. This is because Normal mapping does not account for having a binocular display or motion parallax. Because of this, Normal maps will often come out looking flat when viewed with a VR device. However, that does not mean that you should not, or will not, need to use Normal maps; it just means that you need to more closely evaluate if the data you are trying to convey in the Normal map would be better off being made out of geometry. Below, you will find some different techniques that can be used in place of Normal maps.