Technical deep-dives, workflow breakdowns, and thoughts on game development — from shaders and VFX to tools and optimization.
That blue-purple texture in the Normal slot is storing direction vectors, not colour. Here's how normals drive lighting, backface culling, collision, and reflections — and what a normal map is actually doing under the hood.
Most surface data — roughness, metallic, AO, masks — is greyscale. There’s no reason it needs its own texture. Here’s how ORM packing works, why it matters beyond mobile, and a field guide to every greyscale map you’ll encounter.
The blend mode dropdown is a performance switch. Here's what opaque, masked, and translucent actually cost the GPU — and why a fully-white translucent pixel still renders everything behind it.
Nested widget hierarchies in UMG quietly eat into your frame budget. Here’s the technique I used on Desert Revenant to cut widget count and draw batches by consolidating decorative layers into a single material.