Meghdad AsadiLari

Assistant Professor | School of Film and Animation | College of Art and Design | RIT

Case Study 3B: Unreal Engine Authorized Instructor (UAI)

Project Overview:

In 2025, I pursued and received Silver-level certification as an Unreal Engine Authorized Instructor (UAI) from Epic Games. The certification recognizes demonstrated competency in two distinct and simultaneous domains: technical mastery of Unreal Engine and the capacity to deliver complex technical material through strong instructional design, providing formal external validation of both, documented as a scholarly record. It is distinct from student work, course submissions, or pedagogical outputs; it is a third-party, industry-expert assessment of me as an instructor, conducted independently of any institutional review process.

The certification sits within a sustained and documented engagement with Unreal Engine as both a research platform and a teaching environment, spanning the full tenure period. It builds on several interconnected contributions:

As a team member on the Virtual Production Epic Mega Grant (2020-2022), a $275,000 RIT-based award from Epic Games supporting virtual production curriculum development, I produced a free comprehensive online course titled "Intro to Unreal's Niagara Particle System," now exceeding 30,000 views.
I also participated in an intensive mentorship session led by The Third Floor, a leading previsualization company.
My independent technical research in the Unreal Engine’s ecosystem also resulted in peer-reviewed international conference acceptances, including a workshop at the University Film and Video Association (UFVA) Annual Conference (Fredonia, NY, 2022), co-presented with M. Reisch titled “Real Time Rendering Pipeline: From Maya FBX to the Unreal Engine Workflow” and multiple peer-reviewed talks, demos, and publications emerging from the real-time 2D puppeting and motion capture research documented in Case Study 1A.

The UAI certification is the individual, formally credentialed outcome of that trajectory.

Peer Review and Selection:

The UAI certification is awarded through a rigorous, multi-stage evaluation process assessing both technical mastery and instructional effectiveness. The evaluation is conducted by industry experts against detailed criteria spanning instructional design, technical accuracy, content structure, delivery style, and learner engagement.

submitted instructional video tutorial as a part of assessment process

The pathway involved two formal assessment stages:

a comprehensive written examination covering Unreal Engine technical knowledge, and
the independent production of a polished instructional video tutorial.

The tutorial was submitted to Epic Games and scored by industry evaluators using detailed rubrics. Preparation for the examination components required sustained independent study of official Epic documentation and structured training materials, including hundreds of pages of technical resources and over one hundred hours of video instruction. The tutorial production phase required an additional six weeks dedicated to scripting, recording, editing, and refining the submission to meet Epic's instructional standards.

On the first attempt, I achieved the Silver-level badge with an overall score of 84 out of 100, placing the submission well within the Silver certification range. The evaluation criteria covered instructional effectiveness, content delivery, and technical knowledge simultaneously, making the score a composite measure of both pedagogical and technical performance.

Dissemination:

The certification is publicly issued and verifiable through Epic Games credentials platform:

https://credential.unrealengine.com/b14c21f5-dffe-4c26-89b2-883179eee715#acc.DN4bVlZT

As a UAI, I join a select global community of Epic-recognized Unreal Engine educators, positioning me, and by extension RIT's School of Film and Animation, within an internationally recognized ecosystem supported by one of the most prominent companies in game development and real-time production.

The Silver-level credential provides formal, third-party documentation of pedagogical competency in one of the most technically demanding tools currently taught in animation, game development, and production programs. It serves a dual function: it directly strengthens teaching practice by aligning course content and instructional methods with industry-validated standards, and it establishes an externally documented record of scholarly engagement with pedagogy as a field of practice, not only an institutional obligation.