Coursework: CGT245
What's CGT245?
"Game Development I". That's the official course title of Purdue's CGT245/CNIT306. Despite having a generic name, Game Dev I focuses on concrete and specific topics in Unreal Engine 5 and Autodesk Maya / Blender. As a strictly project-based course, every topic in CGT245 comes associated with its hands-on lab project. Listed under "Table of contents" at the top left corner, these projects help develop technical skill sets while encouraging artistic creativity.
I love CGT245 a lot. There's a nice balance between learning new stuff and utilizing preexisting experiences, and the lecture style is interesting. Adapting to UE5 was frustrating at first, but thanks to the CGT245 TA, Brantly, who created an amazing collection of written and video tutorials on UE4/5, I got a jumpstart transitioning from other game engines to Unreal.
About UE5
Unreal Engine 5 is pretty nice to use, except for some moments where UE is particularly garbage. Whenever I try doing something "advanced" (of course, by 'advanced' I mean probably doing something wrong somehow), Unreal will immediately crash, sometimes without emergency-saving. The last time when this happened, I was trying to create a world-aligned texture. When "Convert to Texture Object" was selected on a "Texture Sample", Unreal decides to crash and murder the entire file...
That said, Unreal does feel more "Powerful", especially so when compared to some older stuff that I'm used to. For context, I'm a CS1.6 community mapper who used mostly Valve Hammer / Worldcraft. In Valve's Source Engine, fiddling with cubemaps positioning is essential for having usable reflections. On the other hand, Unreal's reflection rendering somehow looks fantastic with default settings, and a single cubemap actor spawned at (0, 0) that I never even touched.
The reason why my Unreal looks like Hammer
Contact Me
Yake Wang | 400 McCutcheon Drive, Room 175, West Lafayette, IN, USA
Email (personal): me@yake.wang
Email (school): zackwang@purdue.edu
Cell: +1 (508) 826-6534