The Engine, From A TA's Point Of View
These pages cover Unreal from a technical art perspective: importing content, building materials and tools, and checking performance. Start with the editor basics, or go straight to profiling if you already have a scene to investigate.
The Basics
Getting Started
The editor from a TA's seat - projects, the Content Browser, viewport survival, and the settings to change on day one.
read -> 02The Asset Pipeline
Getting meshes and textures into the engine correctly - scale, collision, LODs, folder structure, and naming conventions.
read -> 03Materials 101
PBR inputs, the material graph, and using master materials and instances to share shader logic.
read -> 04Blueprints 101
Visual scripting basics: events, the construction script, when Blueprint is fine, and when to ask for C++.
read -> 05Python In Unreal
Editor scripting with the unreal module - batch-editing assets, the Asset Registry, and building your first audit script.
read ->Performance
The Optimisation Mindset
Measure first, set budgets, then find the bottleneck. That's where every performance investigation starts.
read -> 07Profiling & Finding Bottlenecks
stat unit, stat gpu, Unreal Insights, and how to tell Game-Thread-bound from GPU-bound.
read -> 08Meshes, Nanite & LODs
Draw calls, LOD chains, instancing, HLOD, and when Nanite does (and doesn't) save you.
read -> 09Textures & Streaming
Resolution discipline, compression formats, mips, and the texture streaming pool.
read -> 10Materials & Shaders
Shader complexity, instruction counts, samplers, translucency, and overdraw.
read -> 11Lighting & Shadows
Light mobility, shadowed movable lights, Lumen, and virtual shadow maps - systems to measure when lighting is expensive.
read -> 12CPU, Blueprints & Ticks
Tick discipline, Blueprint costs, garbage collection, and object pooling.
read -> 13The Scene Audit Checklist
The audit every TA should run on a level, ordered by what usually pays off first, plus the tool that automates it.
read ->Unreal Asset Health Dashboard
Run one Python script inside your project, drag the JSON it exports into your browser, and get every mesh, texture, material, and Blueprint scored against the audit rules in this section. Nothing uploads - the analysis never leaves your browser.