Projects | Ziqi Lu

Off Balance

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Off Balance

In Off Balance, I focused on creating procedural stylized textures using Substance Designer, including metal grates, concrete, wood, and coated metal rust, while optimizing memory performance through texture compression. I also developed stylized VFX using Niagara, such as smoke and fire, and created ocean materials to enhance the environmental visuals of the game world.

Project Titan

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Project Titan

This project is a tutorial-based technical study and validation of Houdini’s procedural workflows, focused on recreating a 3D environment using Unreal Engine 5. The goal was to understand, evaluate, and production-test procedural asset pipelines and workflows introduced in the tutorial series, as well as their integration with modern UE5 technologies. It covers the recreation and optimization of a wide range of digital asset tools, including procedural signage, building generation, rail systems, train destruction FX, VAT characters, trees with wind effects, fences, platforms, shrubs, ivy, trains, cloth, stacking, and cables. Through these exercises, I not only replicated the functionality demonstrated in the tutorials but also gained practical experience in procedural generation, material and VFX creation, simulation optimization, and engine integration, providing a strong foundation for efficiently creating complex game environments.

Offbeat Reprise

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Offbeat Reprise

As a developer, I was responsible for all aspects of the project except for game design and level design, including programming, asset creation, and sound design.

Notably, after the designers proposed the feature of “bullet time combined with physically simulated glass shattering,” the initial prototype I implemented suffered from severe performance issues. By analyzing Unity’s call stack in depth, I identified the performance bottleneck as the repeated creation and destruction of physics simulation objects, as well as the unnecessary participation of glass fragments in the simulation during room geometry movement. To address this, I pre-created the glass fragments at game startup and temporarily disabled their participation in the physics simulation when the environment changed. This optimization successfully resolved the performance problem.

Sherlock Holmes: Perfect Crime

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sherlock Holmes: Perfect Crime

In this large-scale project, I was responsible for more specialized tasks, including scene lighting, as well as the creation of hero assets and materials. More specifically, this involved producing gameplay-driven content closely tied to the gameplay, such as the “chemical laboratory kits” and “poison decal” featured in the game.

Living Strokes

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Living Strokes

My main part is the AI Optical Character Recognition (OCR) plugin system. I integrate PPOCR-v5, the most advanced open-source model, into Unreal engine, supporting the core gameplay.

Besides that, as a tech artist, I also help create the manga stylized shaders, visual effects, environment art design, and all the lighting.

WaterLOD

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

With the progress of computer-aided simulation research, there’s an increasing demand for large-scale 3D fluid simulation in geotechnical and hydraulic fields. These fields require processing large-scale, high-precision fluid simulation data. However, traditional visualization technologies have limitations including low efficiency, poor reality and lack of intuitiveness. At the same time, the promising application prospect of currently popping technologies such as Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality require development of photo-realistic scene fluid visualization.

Therefore, this study concentrates on the photo-realistic scene visualization of large-scale fluid particle data, aiming to rapidly and interactively visualize particle data at around hundred-million level. This study first introduces the continuous level of detail technique into the field of fluid particle data through in-depth observation of input data characteristics to reduce performance waste; At the same time, by monitoring hardware performance, intelligent preloading of future frames of fluid animation can improve the smoothness of video rendering. The core of this study is to develop on the vtkOpenGLFluidMapper class in VTK’s OpenGL extension. By applying the continuous level-of-detail technology and the future frame pre-loading and transmission optimization technique, it establishes an efficient fluid particle data scene visualization method, and implemented a prototype system to validate the feasibility and superiority of the algorithm. The research improves the efficiency of authenticity visualization without significantly compromising visual effects.

FlameGS

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

FlameGS

July 2024 - Sept. 2024

Research Intern at University of Utah, Advisor:Yang Yin

Developed a comprehensive process pipeline to reconstruct photo-realistic facial meshes, textures, and animations from monocular or multi-camera video sources, enhancing the avatar realism and versatility in various applications
Integrated the FLAME parametric differentiable face model with the Gaussian Splatting method to efffficiently capture detailed features under extreme data distributions
Formulated a transfer algorithm for further simulation on the mixed avatar representation of meshes and gaussians, which are fully controllable and user-friendly in terms of expression, pose, and viewpoint
Achieved comparable image similarity and multi-view consistency with state-of-the-art methods, while also producing more temporally smooth pose and expression animations

Copyright

Header image copyright: by Technical University of Munich

3D Modeling

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Auto Hydrology

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The script is developed based on ArcGIS python library for hydrology class research in Tsinghua University. All the source code was open-sourced for next year???s students.

Chinese-style Dance

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

MikuMikuDance is a 3D Animation Software developed as a promotional element for fans of the Sony/Sega Vocaloid product. At the mean time MY Enlightment of Computer Graphics and Animation.

MV of song Wings of Light

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I worked as the editor and director in the production of a MV of song covering, meanwhile a birthday gift for my friend.

Micro-PT

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Features

Distributed Path Tracing / Stochastic Progressive Photon Mapping
OpenMP Multi-threading
Modern Microfacet Material Support
Bounding Volume Hierarchy Acceleration

Embedded Rotaeno

Thu, 02 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Projects | Ziqi Lu

Off Balance

Off Balance

Project Titan

Project Titan

Offbeat Reprise

Offbeat Reprise

Sherlock Holmes: Perfect Crime

Sherlock Holmes: Perfect Crime

Living Strokes

Living Strokes

WaterLOD

FlameGS

FlameGS

Copyright

3D Modeling

Auto Hydrology

Chinese-style Dance

MV of song *Wings of Light*

Micro-PT

Features

Embedded Rotaeno

MV of song Wings of Light