- Budget 75 minutes across competing tasks and know when "done enough" beats "perfect."
- Say what each rubric line actually measures, so nothing on the exam surprises you.
- Georeference a scene to given coordinates and set the sun to a stated hour, unaided.
- Create a Blueprint, place your first nodes, and explain the difference between an event, a function call, and a variable.
10:00 · Brief The exam, demystified
Everything on today's exam is something you have already done at least twice in guided labs. This isn't a trick; it's a floor check. We spend the first 45 minutes walking the format so the only unknown left is the spec sheet itself.
The format
At 2:45 you get a one-page spec describing a small scene — think "a lit interior corner with three distinct materials and a packaged walkable build," not a cathedral. You have 75 minutes at your own station, starting from a blank UE 5.8 project. The spec lists required elements and their acceptance criteria; how you get there is up to you. Official Epic documentation is allowed. Agents, chatbots, and classmates are not.
What's covered
- Weeks 1–2: project creation, backup hygiene, viewport and outliner fluency, content browser discipline.
- Weeks 3–4: blockout at believable 1:1 scale; PBR materials and instances; a considered lighting scenario.
- Weeks 5–6: clean asset import, simple environment dressing, and packaging a build that runs outside the editor.
How to prepare (past tense, hopefully)
The best preparation was last week's homework: cold-starting a scene from nothing with a timer running. If you didn't do it, the next 40 minutes of Q&A is your last chance to ask about anything from Weeks 1–6. Ask now, not at 3:30.
Claude Code, Codex, chatbots, and the site's AI TA are all off-limits from 2:45 to the end of the exam. The argument is simple: agents are force multipliers, and anything times zero is zero. A director who can't do the work can't judge the work — and every AI lab for the rest of the semester assumes you can catch the agent being wrong. Today establishes that you can. Using an agent during the exam is an academic integrity matter, full stop.
Reported hiring data says degrees alone don't land jobs — portfolios, internships, and demonstrable skills do, and AI fluency commands a premium on top of fundamentals, not instead of them. Today's no-AI exam is the floor everything else stands on.
10:45 · The exam Build to spec
Spec sheets go out face-down. When everyone has one, we start the clock: 75 minutes, hard stop. The sheet carries your coordinates for the geo station as well as the scene spec. Submit by dropping your zipped project and the packaged build in the class share.
Expectations and rules
- Work alone, at your own station. Headphones fine; screens visible to the room.
- Official documentation allowed; AI tools of any kind not allowed.
- Save early, save often — incremental saves protect you if anything crashes, and your working process is part of the grade.
- If the engine fights you (shader compiles, a crash), raise a hand. Lost time to tooling failures gets added back; lost time to skipped labs does not.
- Partial credit is real: a rough scene that packages beats a beautiful scene that doesn't.
The geo station
One of the stations is geo, and it is worth 15% on its own. Weeks 1 and 2 put you on the real earth; this is where you show that was not a one-off with the instructions open beside you.
- Georeference to the coordinates on the sheet
Decimal degrees, typed, latitude and longitude the right way round. You will know within seconds if they are not.
- Anchor to the globe and stream terrain
Cesium World Terrain and OSM Buildings only — no Google tiles. That is deliberate: nothing in this exam should depend on an API quota or a network hiccup under time pressure.
- Set the sun to the exam hour
Date and time on the sheet, in the right timezone for those coordinates. The shadows should agree with a window.
- Screenshot and submit
One frame showing the site, the terrain and the light, dropped in the class share with the rest of your submission.
What's assessed
| Criterion | Weight | Full marks looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Scene assembly & scale | 20% | Spec elements present, proportions believable at human scale, nothing floating or intersecting. |
| Materials | 15% | Required materials distinct and physically plausible; instances used where sensible. |
| Lighting | 20% | A deliberate scenario, not default sky — readable, no blown or dead areas, sensible method for the scene. |
| Geo station | 15% | Georeferenced to the coordinates on the sheet, anchored to the globe, sun set to the exam hour, screenshot submitted. Terrain streaming and the horizon believable. |
| Project hygiene | 10% | Named assets, tidy folders, incremental saves that show working process. |
| Packaged build | 20% | The build launches on a machine that isn't yours and you can walk the space. |
12:00 · After the break First contact with Blueprints
You've earned the fun part. Blueprints are Unreal's visual scripting system — the way this course makes worlds respond. Today is vocabulary and first nodes; next week we build real interactions.
- Open the Level Blueprint
In any project (your exam scene works), open the Level Blueprint from the Blueprints button on the main toolbar. This graph belongs to the level itself — a fine sandbox for a first script.
- Your first event
Find Event BeginPlay in the graph (add it if missing). Events are the "when": when play starts, when something overlaps, when a key is pressed. Nothing happens in a Blueprint except in response to an event.
- Your first node
Drag off BeginPlay's white execution pin and add a Print String node. Type something. Press Play. The white wire is execution order — the spine of every graph you'll ever read.
- Your first variable
Create a variable in the My Blueprint panel — an Integer named
OpenCount. Drag it into the graph as Get and as Set. Colored wires carry data; white wires carry time. That one sentence is half of Blueprint literacy. - React to input
Add a keyboard event (search the graph for a key name, e.g. F). On press, increment
OpenCountand print it. You've built the skeleton of every interaction: event → change state → show result. - Make it belong to a thing
Now the proper way: create a Blueprint Class (Actor) in the content browser, add a Point Light component, and on the F key toggle its visibility. Actor Blueprints — not the Level Blueprint — are where next week lives.
1:15 · Crit / share Decompression
No crit of exam work — it's graded, not critiqued. Instead, round the room: the one thing you reached for during the exam and realized you'd always let the guided steps (or the agent) do for you. Then thirty seconds each on your first Blueprint: what did the light-toggle feel like compared to placing static props? That feeling is Phase 2.
Homework — due before Week 8
| Task | Deliverable |
|---|---|
| Rebuild today's light-toggle Blueprint from memory in your sandbox project, then extend it: make the light change color on every third press. | Actor Blueprint saved in your sandbox project. |
Resources
- Blueprints Visual Scripting — official docs; read the "Getting Started" pages before Week 8.
- Epic Developer Community — Learning — the guided courses the exam drew on; also home to solid Blueprint intro courses.
- UE 5.8 release notes — skim the Blueprint editor updates before next week.
- Robert Half 2026 tech hiring — the data behind today's skill-floor argument.