Making your VR application more
realistic – adding complex physics to
games
Whitepaper
Chao Huang
SSG
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Abstract
Nowadays, VR is welcomed by lots of developers, OEMs, and end users. People enjoy VR
experience as they can be immersive in a virtual world. In that situation, physics plays an
even more important role than before because it gives users a more real experie nce while in
the virtual world. In that case, the physics provided by original games engines may not be
enough. Developers need to developer together with game engines and professional physics
engine. This whitepaper will show you how to develop with Unreal and bullet physics?
This whitepaper is aimed at ISVs, VR HMDs OEMs, and other technical developers.
Unreal & bullet Introduction
Unreal Engine 4 is a complete suite of game development tools made by game developers,
for game developers. From 2D mobile games to console blockbusters and VR, Unreal Engine 4
gives you lots of things you need to start, ship, grow and stand out from the crowd.
Bullet Physics is an open source physics engine, nowadays, there are 3 major physics
engines (the other two are Havok and PhysX). They are widely used in game development and
video creating. Bullet physics is a free but very professional physics engine, which is already
used in lots of platforms like Windows, Linux, MAC, Play station and so on. The famous
benchmark 3DMark also used bullet physics.
Step by step development
New an Unreal project.
Create a C++ class.
Picture 1 New an Unreal sample project
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Picture 2 New a C++ class
Choose the class you want to create
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Picture 3 Create a actor class
Click next
Click Create Class
Picture 4 choose class name you want to create
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Picture 5 the class will be auto created in visual studio
Now, you can add your C++ code to call physical engines.
Drag the class into level editor, you will be able to set it visible in your games.
Picture 6 Add details to C++ class through unreal editor
Add components to C++ class, for example, add a cone/cubic/particle systems to control what
will be showed through the calculations. And after that, you successful integrate your physical
calculations with the unreal engine.
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Picture 7 Add components to your C++ class
From the guide above we can see that, it is very easy for developers to add or integrate
other physics engine to original game engines like Unreal. With the powerful and professional
physical effect, the end users could definitely enjoy a more realistic virtual reality experie nce.
What’s more, Intel’s powerful calculations could be fully used to do physics calculation while
GPU is busy in rendering
Conclusion & Suggestions：
From the guide above we can see that, it is very easy for developers to add or integrate
other physics engine to original game engines like Unreal. With the powerful and professional
physical effect, the end users could definitely enjoy a more realistic virtual reality experience.
What’s more, Intel’s powerful calculations could be fully used to do physics calculation while
GPU is busy in rendering.
About author
Chao Huang, Intel SSG Senior Software Application Engineer. He has many years of virtual
reality development and optimization experience and have several patents on this field.
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