Welcome to my personal Unreal Engine documentation hub — a curated, battle-tested wiki dedicated entirely to creating cinematics in Unreal Engine.
This wiki exists for two reasons:
🎓 To support the students I teach
🤝 To collaborate efficiently with friends and colleagues
🧠 To document, refine, and evolve my own production workflow
If you're working in real-time cinematic production — from previs to final pixel — this is for you.
This wiki covers the full cinematic pipeline inside Unreal Engine, organized by how productions actually function:
Cinematics & Rendering
Sequencer — Timeline management, shot structure, camera cuts, sub-sequences
Movie Render Queue (MRQ) — High-quality output, render passes, EXR workflows
Lumen — Real-time global illumination for cinematic lighting
Film Theory — Composition, lens language, blocking, visual storytelling, cinematic grammar
Environment & World Building
World Building — Environment assembly, level composition, set dressing
Level structuring for cinematic production
Atmospheric lighting and environmental storytelling
Characters & Performance
MetaHumans — Digital human workflows for cinematic production
Characters — Skeletal meshes, materials, grooming, character lookdev
Animation (Anim) — Performance blocking, keyframing, retargeting
Technical Animation (Tech Anim) — Rig systems, constraints, deformation workflows
Motion Capture (MoCap) — Performance capture, cleanup, retargeting, Live Link workflows
Control Rig — In-engine rigging and shot-based animation workflows
Pipeline & Tools
Blueprints — Cinematic logic, shot triggers, tool scripting
Python — Automation, batch processing, pipeline efficiency
Project structure, naming conventions, version control discipline
This wiki is organized the way real productions operate — from preproduction and asset ingestion through layout, previs, animation, lighting, FX, rendering, and final delivery. Each section reflects hands-on production experience and includes practical examples, naming conventions, workflow standards, common pitfalls, and performance considerations. The goal is not just to explain tools, but to document repeatable, production-ready processes.
For my students, this serves as a technical companion to class: a structured reference that reinforces professional workflows, expectations, and decision-making. For collaborators, it establishes shared standards — from folder structures and render settings to version control and naming conventions — so that we can move quickly without sacrificing clarity or consistency. When everyone works from the same technical foundation, creative collaboration becomes significantly smoother.
This wiki exists because real-time cinematic production evolves rapidly. Tools change, features improve, and best practices shift. Rather than relying on scattered notes or memory, this site acts as a centralized, evolving source of truth: practical, opinionated, continuously updated, and built around real projects. Cinematics in Unreal are not simply about rendering images; they require intentional camera work, grounded lighting, clean data management, efficient iteration, reproducibility, and disciplined collaboration.
Whether you are a student developing foundational skills, a collaborator joining a project, or a professional refining your pipeline, this wiki is designed to support serious real-time filmmaking. Welcome to the documentation — let’s build better cinematics.