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 […]
Author: Skyler Gao
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 […]
In Week 8, George talked about body mechanics and how to plan a short animation shot in Maya. He said body mechanics is about how the body moves with weight, balance, foot placement, and posture. It is the first and most important layer of animation. For this assignment, we did not focus on acting. We […]
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 […]
This week in Ting’s class we focused on hands in animation. The main idea was that hands are never “doing nothing”. Even when the body is still, the hands should show what the character is feeling and help define their personality. A well-posed hand can make the acting more believable and help the audience connect […]
This week in the Tuesday session with George, we continued developing our walk cycles in spline. The main focus was to move away from copying reference frame by frame and to trust our planning and key poses more. I realised that a good walk cycle does not come from “tracing” the video, but from understanding […]
In Week 6, I began to build the environment for my Narcissus project in Unreal Engine. This week was mainly about shaping the world space, because I needed a clear place for the story to happen. I used the Unreal Landscape system and worked with the brush tools to create the basic terrain. My first […]