LerpworksAcademy

Courses Materials Glossary Trainer Profile

Graphics19/21 Math and physics15/15 Tech art Art Environment World and levels45/45 Effects Animation Game design Interface and UX Programming Character AI Multiplayer Sound Production and release Reference0/1

Sections

Basics

Color is numbers Normals and light UV: how a picture gets onto a model Shader: a function for every pixel Surface properties: roughness, metallic, AO Material: a shader plus data

Space

Spaces: where a point is Tangent space and normal maps

Textures

Texture settings for every map

Materials

A master material from scratch

Light

Direct and indirect light Shadows: maps, cascades and soft edges Reflections: cubemaps, SSR and Lumen Baked and live light: lightmaps and Lumen

The frame

How an engine draws a frame: passes and the G-buffer Depth buffer: what is closer to the camera Transparency: Opaque, Masked, Translucent Anti-aliasing: stair-steps, flicker and TSR LOD, instancing and Nanite: drawing a million blades of grass Fog and post-processing The frame budget on the graphics card

Vectors

Vectors: arrows you can add Dot product: how much two arrows point the same way Cross product: an arrow perpendicular to two others

Angles and rotations

Angles, sine and cosine: a point on a circle Matrices: new axes, not a table of numbers Rotations in 3D: Euler angles and quaternions

Transitions, randomness, numbers

Interpolation: lerp, smoothstep and remap Randomness: seeds, distributions and fairness Numbers in a computer: integers, floats and precision

Physics of motion

Motion: velocity, acceleration and the time step Forces: gravity, friction and drag Springs and damping: a smooth camera and soft motion Collisions: how the engine knows that objects touch Why fast bodies fall through walls Buoyancy: objects on waves

The idea

How a world is built: from large to small World scale: meters, minutes and density Open-world design: regions and landmarks A world you believe in: where people live and where the roads go

Level design

Wayfinding: how players find the way Metrics: a level built around the hero’s body Blockout: a world of boxes Layout: loops, forks and dead ends Pacing: tension and rest Gates and keys: a world that opens piece by piece Verticality: height as a tool

Space and combat

Composition in 3D Interior and exterior Encounters: arenas, cover and lines of fire Stealth levels: light, shadow, patrols and cover Multiplayer maps: balance, lanes and chokepoints Level scripting: triggers, doors and scenes

Terrain

Landscape: terrain from a heightmap What real land looks like Gaea: first steps Erosion in Gaea: water, talus and deposits Terrain from a generator into the engine Ground material: layers, slope and tiling Masks from terrain in Gaea: slope, flow and deposits Caves, arches and overhangs: when a heightmap isn’t enough

Water and roads

Water in the world: lakes, rivers and shores Lake and river in Unreal Roads and trails

Vegetation and placement

Biomes: how a forest is built Scattering by rules Plant a forest by rules in PCG Placing things along roads and shores

Large worlds

Air and distance: fog, sky and time of day Open world: how it loads in pieces Open-world budget

World breakdowns

Zelda: Breath of the Wild — triangles and gravity Firewatch: a forest built by a small team Horizon Zero Dawn: placing a world by rules Far Cry 5: a world built by rules in Houdini Ghost of Tsushima: the island, the grass and the wind Epic’s PCG samples: assemblies, flat ground and biomes

Level breakdowns

How to study someone else’s level de_dust2: why the map has lasted for decades Dark Souls: a world that folds back on itself Hitman: Sapienza, a town built as a sandbox

Progress

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Tools

Unreal material nodes

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All pitfalls

Reference

Every pitfall page: what breaks and how to fix it.

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