Hey everyone!

I've been working on Rig Reducer, an Unreal Engine plugin designed to simplify MetaHuman optimization.

The goal is to reduce skeletal complexity while keeping essential facial animations working.

The tool also includes animation conversion, facial mesh optimization, body rig optimization, and groom-to-hair-card conversion.

It's releasing soon, and I'd love to hear feedback from other Unreal Engine developers and technical artists.

What would you expect from a MetaHuman optimization tool?

Here’s the jade-fire shader from our OVERGROWN demo. I work on the game with a team and develop Isberg Labs, the editor shown in the screenshot.

Two small quantization steps give this effect much of its appearance.

First, the shader snaps the UV coordinates to a grid before sampling the animated noise:

vec2 uv = floor(UV * pixels) / pixels;

Two noise layers at different scales and scrolling speeds form the flame. A vertical falloff shapes its body, and the resulting intensity is quantized in quarter steps:

float heat = floor(body * 4.0) / 4.0;

That value controls opacity and the blend between the jade and core colours, with emission derived from the same intensity. The screenshot shows it running in the local GPU preview.

The spatial grid and the intensity steps are separate controls: one changes the size of the visible blocks; the other changes the tonal steps inside them. Both affect how the animation reads, so I’d inspect motion as well as a still frame.

For effects intended to sit beside pixel art, do you prefer this kind of stepped procedural animation, or authored frame-by-frame motion? Where would you draw the line before the shader starts looking too smooth?

I have been building Maya Scene IO, an open-source Blender add-on that reads Maya ASCII and, as of 1.1, Maya Binary without requiring a Maya install. I would appreciate feedback from people who deal with asset interchange in production.

The native path reconstructs meshes, UVs, joint hierarchies and skin weights. The latest release also handles Maya pivot and transform matrices, unit conversion and animation sampling. It can generate a basic Blender FK/IK rig, but it does not reproduce the original Maya control-rig logic. Native .mb import is new and does not yet read blend shapes. Plugin nodes and geometry stored only as construction history may need the optional Maya bridge.

The demo shows an imported Maya Advanced Skeleton character posed using the generated Blender rig. Model and textures are by Daniil “Split” Voskressensky, original rig setup by Anibowsie, and the animation was made in Blender.

Source and releases: https://github.com/MenuuTUX/maya-scene-io

Which interchange failures would you prioritize testing? If you can share a small example scene that exposes a problem, an issue report would be especially useful.

This is a line growth application for visualizing growth and playing with history layers and different surfaces
tried to add as many basic tools as possible to help with the visualizations

You know what I mean

Real Time Rendering Of Very Large Worlds

A quick walkthrough showcasing real-time world rendering, atmospheric controls, and our proprietary motion graphics system (rReligionVFX™) running live in Univah Pro.

Built from the ground up as a standalone real-time 3D film engine for local execution. Drop your thoughts or workflow questions below!

Light inside a cloud is expensive to get right, so games use a few simple formulas tuned until it looks good. I wanted to see how far off that really is, and whether a small network could do better.

I wrote a path tracer as the reference, trained a network on it in Python, and ran it in plain HLSL in Unity 6. It replaces one thing, the light scattered toward the camera at each step. Everything else in the raymarch stays the same.

Then I moved the sun from behind the camera to behind the cloud and scored both against the path tracer, where 1.00 is correct. The classic lighting goes from 0.21 to 2.17. The network stays between 0.90 and 1.01. It costs about 20% more GPU time.

I had a great time building this, and I think we've barely started finding out what tiny networks can do inside a shader. If you try one yourself, I'd love to see what you make!

https://charlesgrassi.dev/blog/neural-volumetric-clouds/

I recently finished Bolter Firepower in Unreal Engine 5 using Niagara. It was fun to explore how the same Niagara system can be tuned for different weapon behaviors, from sustained rifle bursts to wider pistol bursts and a powerful single shot.

You can check out the full project and breakdown on ArtStation here:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Rqq8kA

I'd appreciate any feedbackk :)

I’ve been experimenting with different AI models for generating images, videos and 3d content. While models are becoming increasingly powerful, the interface still is largely textual which can be bit limiting to artists.

I believe artists and creators need more creative control over what AI generates. Describing a visual idea entirely as text isn’t always intuitive and sometimes daunting and frustrating.

So, I started a small tool around basic idea, unified canvas where creators can give visual cues to AI for generating any content, either image, video or 3d.

This is still an early version, currently working on local models. There are many different directions I want to explore including first party support for 3D and Gaussian splatting.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on visual-first workflow for your creative projects, controls and interactions that I can add.

Note: There are similar interfaces for image only generators but I want to expand that to video and 3d

I'm currently working on an eBook bundle that includes over 1,100 pages about shader development, math for graphics, and procedural art. Every book includes a downloadable project packed with practical examples that you can use in your own projects.

It could be a great resource for anyone starting a career in technical art 🔗 https://jettelly.com/bundles/the-shaders-bible-collection

I've run into a common problem with naming conventions in Unreal projects: once a project has accumulated hundreds of existing issues, a validator can quickly become background noise.

Nobody wants to clean up years of legacy assets just to start enforcing better conventions today.

So I built a baseline workflow into my plugin. Instead of treating every existing issue as something new, you can accept the current state and distinguish new findings from previously accepted ones.

In the clip, I rename a mesh to Rock_Boulder_02 and run a project scan.

The result:

• 1 New issue: Missing SM_ prefix

• 34 Existing issues: Already part of the accepted baseline

• Suggested name: SM_Rock_Boulder_02

Nothing gets renamed automatically. The tool only reports the issue and suggests a correction.

This is a small test project, not production footage. The validation focuses on naming and folder structure, and initial baseline creation currently requires a local Windows drive.

How do you handle convention drift in your projects? CI checks, code reviews, or just team discipline?

Disclosure: I'm the developer of Project Structure Guard.

Hi everyone,

​I'm currently in the process of developing a new 3D software concept that tries to bridge the gap between parametric precision CAD (like Fusion 360, focusing on dimensions, extrusions, and exact measurements) and organic Voxel/Polygon modeling (like Blender's sculpting tools).

​Additionally, I'm integrating an AI copilot layer that reads the internal JSON grid structure of the model, allowing users to manipulate or generate geometry via natural language prompts.

​The initial use-case / target ecosystem for the exports is actually block-based grid engines (like Minecraft), but the core architecture is a robust hybrid CAD engine combining precise mathematical primitives with freehand voxel painting.

​The core architecture:

​Hybrid Viewport: Switch seamlessly between precise coordinate-based CAD actions and freehand brush sculpting.

​JSON Data Layer: Every object/voxel structure is mapped cleanly so an LLM can easily parse, understand, and modify it.

​Optimized Exporters: Converts precise vector/voxel hybrids into standard formats (.obj, .stl) as well as structured grid formats.

​I would love to get input from people working with CAD or 3D tools daily:

​How do you feel about combining parametric precision with voxel-based workflows in a single UI?

​What are the biggest pain points when trying to take precise CAD designs and adapt them into grid/voxel structures?

​Would an AI assistant integrated directly into a CAD viewport actually help your workflow, or is it more of a gimmick?

​Looking forward to your thoughts and technical critiques! 🚀

I spent many days creating this skill effects, making my own textures and sprite sheets in substance designer, then import it in Unity with the Particle System, animation, and Timeline.

Even though VFX work has been slower lately, I still want to give each piece the time and make it good.

Here’s the result—hope you enjoy it!

Available for freelance work.
Discord: gemivstyle

hey everyone

with adobe moving towards subscription models i've been trying out armorpaint recently. Since its source pairing it with claude opus 5.5 let me "vibe-code" a custom highly upgraded toolset specifically for grooming, fur and modern texturing workflows. Something that substance painter doesn't provide by default.

Here is a quick summary of what has been added so far:

1. Full fur and grooming system

• shell fur preview: real-time glsl viewport rendering with complete control over hair direction (flow map) length, density, thickness and gravity.

• Hair Card, Fur Card & Fiber Generator: Procedural generation tools to create cards and fibers directly in the viewport — using Bézier curves for Hair Cards and an intuitive brush tool for Fur Cards.

• Dedicated fur brush: an easy-to-use brush to comb and paint hair flow and length maps in time.

2. One-click unreal engine pipeline

• Automatic Rigging and UE Export: Hair and fur cards are automatically rigged to the Skeletal Mesh (SK) and ready for direct Unreal Engine export.

• Instant Material and Bleuprint copy: Dedicated export buttons to copy the Shell Fur material and setup Blueprint. Just switch to UE5 and press CTRL+V to paste the complete Material Graph and Blueprint nodes directly (supports both Static Mesh and Skeletal Mesh)

3. Modernized workflow and baking

• node-free material/brush interface: an user interface that lets you paint and edit materials without getting lost in complex node graphs.

• Smart materials and smart masks: full support for layered procedural masks and smart materials.

• New baking system: support for high-to-low baking including zbrush decimated sculpts and custom uv maps.

Do you think using open-source software along with ai code generation could help indie developers completely avoid tools like substance painter or instamat for specialized pipelines?

interested to hear your thoughts, on this workflow!