Author: Skyler Gao
Final Project Tutorial In this session with Serra, I talked about my idea of using water reflection in my shot. At the start, I was thinking too much about making real waves, like an ocean. I thought I needed a complex system to make the water look correct. Serra told me this is not the […]
Rendering in UE In Serra’s rendering session, we focused on how to push image quality in Unreal and why the final render often needs higher settings than the viewport. Serra shared several useful console commands for improving output, such as screen percentage, motion blur, depth of field, bloom, tonemapper quality, Lumen reflection tweaks, and virtual […]
Today’s tutorial clarified that my topic—lighting and character across animation, film and games—was too broad for a 1,500-word critical report. The key is to focus on character portrayal and ground the argument in specific scenes rather than general statements. Nigel’s Feedback Tighten the scope. 1,500 words won’t cover “film + games + animation”. Pick one […]
Dynamic Lighting This week’s class exercise was about testing lighting in Unreal Engine. I built a simple scene and tried different light setups to see how they change reflection and mood. I tested several light types and moved them around to compare the direction, intensity, and shadow feeling. I also checked how reflective surfaces react […]
Why I’m doing this While testing lighting in Unreal Engine, I noticed a “small tweak, big change” effect: tiny shifts in direction, intensity, colour temperature or contrast could flip a scene’s mood and push a character from approachable to distant, from trustworthy to threatening. I stopped thinking of lighting as just “making things visible” and […]
Control Rig This week, I also worked on Control Rig to test character movement in Unreal. In the Forward Solve graph, I set up a Full Body IK (FBIK) node and connected several effectors to drive the character’s body parts. I used this to check how the limbs and body follow the controls, and I […]