Critical Research Report

Choosing a Critical Report Topic

As students of UAL, we all have to write critical reports. In order to complete it better as required by the school, I read the article “Choosing a Critical Report Topic”. This article reminds me to choose the topics that interest me and that the topics should neither be too broad nor too narrow. So I initially decided to focus my topic on the NPR 3D-to-2D style technology direction. The reason is very simple: I love playing games and I like the anime style.

Later, as I conducted more in-depth research, I found that this topic was still too broad. I should focus on a specific case. Therefore, I chose Genshin Impact, a Chinese game that has swept the world, as the object of my research. Meanwhile, I also found that I should raise “problematic questions” instead of stating the facts. This topic was a bit too inclined towards a technical description before. I’m not writing a textbook-style thesis; rather, I’m responding to my creative practice and the cultural background I’m in with words.

So in the end, I set the title as Stylised Realism in Genshin Impact_ How NPR Rendering Techniques Shape Anime Aesthetics and Player Perception.

Reference Collection

For the reference section, I have found many different materials to start the research, including research forum videos about developers, paper reports found on Google Scholar, and books on the principles of NPR rendering technology. I will start to summarize in the near future, browse these materials as a whole and then summarize, and finally start writing the report.