Where Can I Find a Computer Running Unreal Engine?

You have several options on the University of Illinois campus, as detailed below.

In all cases you need to be sure to save your code to a cloud-based repo or some other storage…do not expect that the computers will retain your work after you leave.

The Armory Lab

Location: 505 E. Armory Ave. Room 329 (After October 1 it will move to its permanent space in Armory 146)
Hours: M-Th 8:00am - 9:00pm, Friday 8:00am - 6:00pm, Su 1:00pm - 9:00pm
Equipment:
18 Precision 3680 Towers
Intel® Core™ i9 14th Gen 14900K
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070

Siebel Center for Design Lab

Location: 1208 S 4th St, Room 0060
Hours: TBD
Equipment:
Precision 3680 Tower
Intel® Core™ i9 14th Gen 14900K
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070

Immersive Computing Lab: Room 1104 NCSA

This lab will be available starting in Week 2 of the course. To gain access you will need to register with NCSA. Details of how to do this will be posted on CampusWire at the start of Week 2

The EWS computers and associated VR equipment in NCSA room 1104 are available for your use in the course.

Equipment

  • 10 Dell 5280 computers with NVIDIA RTX 3090 GPUs and Unreal Engine 4 and 5 installed.
  • 3 Oculus Quest HMDs with link cables
  • 3 Meta Quest 2 HMDs with link cables
  • 8 remote access only workstations with NVIDIA RTX 2080 TI GPUs and Unreal Engine 4 and 5 installed

In-person Access

  • Noon - Midnight 7 days a week. All students in CS 415 have e-lock access to the room and building during those hours.
  • There is no reservation system, access is first-come first-serve.
  • The lab may sometimes be reserved and unavailable…these dates will posted on Campuswires and a sign posted outside the lab. Do not enter the lab at those times.

Remote Access

The 8 remote machines can be accessed through Engineering IT LabCheck

Grainger Library Idea Lab

The computers in the Idea Lab should be reserved ahead of time. Students can reserve them 24 hours in advance from the website: idealab.illinois.edu. Lab hours are 10am to 10pm Monday through Friday

Mandolorian

  1. Click “Reserve a Space”:

  2. You can then reserve a “seat” in any of the following rooms:
    • 3D Design Lab
    • 3D Digital Scholarship Lab
    • Immersive Learning Lab

  3. When completing a booking form for a seat in one of those rooms, you should make sure to do it at least 24 hours in advance and you should fill out each form field completely, including indicating what software they need. This is important as it help us make sure the software is already installed and is up to date.

  4. In the room reservation pages for the rooms above, they will see an indicator of what VR headsets are installed where, if they happen to need those as well.

  5. Those rooms can also be booked during regular lab hours.

References

Below are a list of online reference material for the topics covered in the course.

Unreal Engine

Blueprint Programming

C++ and Unreal Engine

Geometric Modeling

Essentials of CAGD The Essentials of CAGD by Gerald E. Farin and Dianne Hansford UIUC Library E-book link

Polygon Mesh Processing Geometric Modeling Based on Polygonal Meshes SIGGRAPH 2007 Course Notes PDF

Rendering

Fundamentals of Computer Graphics 4th Edition by Steve Marschner, Peter Shirley Fundamentals of Computer Graphics 4th Edition by Steve Marschner, Peter Shirley UIUC Library E-book link