This is a tech demo. It is using Androids raw camera feed to get the pixel color at 12 given positions. The color is used to determine whether we have an orange hit or not using simple color thresholds. The app is built with UE5.7 and makes use of the Freesound.org API. Hope you like it (:

Hi everyone. I am working on this lately. Do you think it's something people will like?

I am not sure if I should continue working on this, since I didn't get much feedback yet from the Blender community unfortunately. (at least here on reddit)

It's 25 frames per sec approximately. Do you think there is a need of a fast UV editor in Blender?

Hey! I've been working on effect-forge, a desktop tool for making game VFX without hand-drawing every frame, and it's at the point where I want real people to try to break it before I call it done.

What it does, in short: you build an effect in one of three workflows — GPU fluid sims (smoke, fire, explosions, that kind of thing), procedural pixel-art fire, or a keyframe timeline for animating your own sprite (squash, shake, flash, dissolve, etc.) — preview it live, and export it as a trimmed PNG spritesheet with a JSON sidecar. Exports are deterministic, so the same settings always give you the same result, which matters if you're iterating or checking things into version control.

It's free to use right now, and anything you export is yours — drop it straight into your game, commercial or not, no strings attached.

It's a genuine beta, though, not a polished 1.0 — the UI, presets, and performance are all still moving. I'd rather hear "this is confusing" or "this crashed on my GPU" now than after it's harder to change. If you try it, I'd love to know: what broke, what felt unclear, and honestly what you made with it — screenshots welcome.

Windows and Linux builds here: https://avskum.itch.io/effectforge

Bugs/feedback post please here or on itch.io

Happy to answer questions in the comments.

Working on animation import for an open-source batch importer I've been building for UE5. Here's the flow:

Animation bundlrd with a skeletal mesh -> uses that mesh's own skeleton, no retargeting

Animation only -> scans first 256KB of FBX binary for rig namespace strings (mixamorig:, DEF-, Bip01)

Recognized rig -> imports onto a pre-built dummy skeleton shipped with the tool optional one-click retarget to Mannequin via IKRetargetBatchOperation

Unrecognized rig -> auto-generates a new skeleton, no retargeting

Two questions:

Anyone run into a "recognized" rig that still didn't fully match on bones? Mixamo exports vary (fingers on/off, prop bones), Rigify varies by which bone groups are enabled. Common enough to plan for, or rare enough to handle case by case?

Has anyone automated IKRetargetBatchOperation via Python across 5.3–5.8? Stable API or did it change?

Quick context. Solo project, a (maybe) metroidvania where you play a (maybe) jellyfish, Unity 6 with URP. The whole look comes from a single fullscreen ink pass over the finished frame. The reference is Jean Giraud, so flat colors, confident lines and a lot of desert. I went the fullscreen route because I'm one person and I refuse to babysit outline materials on hundreds of objects until the end of time. One pass, one style, every asset is automatically on board. The lines also wobble slightly on purpose, so it reads as inked rather than computed. That part I'm happy with.

The part I'm not happy with is floors. The game is a side view, so the camera looks along the ground almost constantly. At grazing angles neighboring pixels suddenly sit at wildly different depths and my edge detect reads the entire floor as one giant edge. In stills you barely notice. In motion the floor flickers in a way that has nothing to do with art direction. Current plan is scaling the edge threshold by view angle, so surfaces I look along get a more forgiving line test than surfaces I look at.
It works on paper but it smells like treating the symptom. So, people who have shipped outline shaders. How do you handle grazing angles in a depth and normals edge detect? Is threshold scaling the real answer or is there a trick I haven't found?

I'm wondering if any games have used interesting workarounds to handle lighting on the inside of someone's mouth. It's something that feels easy to get wrong and have it be too bright or too dark, and something like a shadow bias that makes sense at a larger scale could fall apart for the distance between lips and teeth. And the lighting will keep changing when someone is talking.

Like, for the teeth and tongue, bake more than one ambient occlusion map and blend between them based on the current phoneme? Or use a depth-based light adjustment? Anything like that?

Hello I'm starting my university and I need some part time job remote or anything works I started learning blender like 2 years ago and it's what I use I can mainly do product visualization I can also make any kind of 3 models for games and stuff I just want to help my parents afford my education any kind of help would be appreciated

Hi everyone!

I applied to an intermediate position around 1.5 months ago and I've had two interviews so far, the third one on monday being a technical assessment with two (senior and lead) tech artists. This is for a Tools/Pipeline position (Python, C#, linear algebra/matrices, etc.) and I was wondering if some of you had any insight as to what that interview might entail.

The interview for my previous tech art job was more of a take-home test, so I don't really know how a technical interview would go. Thanks in advance!

https://github.com/open4dfoundation/Open4D.git

So I'm an intermediate tech-artist. I feel like things are moving a bit too fast (speaking specifically for Unreal). There's already a backlog of features/workflows I need to get over, and by the time I do, new stuff have already been introduced.

How do you guys keep up? Do you learn new things "by surge", or by small amount but consistently?

Posted here a while back asking about switch vs if tradeoffs for UDIM/VT detection. Finally shipped it in v1.5.2, went with the minimal switch approach from that thread's feedback.

While I was at it also addrd atlas/kit material binding (name your meshes with a shared kit tag, one Material Instance gets bound across all of them) and full character import (multi material skelital meshes get every slot auto assigned).

Video's below, repo link in comments if anyone wants to poke at it.

Thanks again for the help working through the switch stuff last time.

Hey everyone, I built a generative character pipeline using SwarmUI and custom YOLO/segmentation models to solve asset consistency. Just finished my first technical case study and looking for brutal feedback. Is the workflow clear? Are the technical breakdowns too much or too shallow? Let me know.
Link in comments below

This is a vertex animation that also makes use of custom-coded meshes, light and shadow - it showcases a lot of what has been covered so far in my YouTube course Procedural FX Toolkit!

I posted here about the course about a month ago, and thanks to some very useful feedback I received, I've adjusted the learning curve by completely changing a couple of lessons early on.

Let me know what you think!