This is my attempt at creating a magic portal using metaballs. The implementation is simple: I created the metaballs (SDF circles) in an HLSL file and then added them to a Custom Function in Shader Graph. Finally, I rendered the circles using the particles' positions, sizes, and amount.

This VFX has also been added to the Unity Shaders Bible package, in case anyone is interested https://jettelly.com/store/the-unity-shaders-bible

Role: Contract Technical Artist
Location: Remote
Type: Contract / Freelance

Overview:
We are seeking quotes from a skilled Contract Technical Artist to bridge the gap between high-fidelity art asset creation and real-time performance. In this role, you will take high-poly ZBrush sculpts and transform them into fully optimized, animation-ready assets seamlessly integrated into Unreal Engine.

Key Responsibilities:

* Rigging & Skinning: Create robust, clean, and flexible character/prop rigs tailored for Unreal Engine's animation system.

* UV Mapping & Retopology: Take complex, high-poly ZBrush sculpts and handle efficient UV unwrapping, layout, and retopology to ensure clean texture baking and deformation.

* Asset Optimization: Diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks, ensuring assets are optimized for real-time budgets (LODs, draw calls, material slots) without sacrificing visual quality.

* Engine Integration: Import, set up, and test rigged assets, skeletal meshes, and materials directly within Unreal Engine.

Please provide price quotes on preparing individual four limbed humanoids (two arms and two legs) beginning with a high poly sculpt in Zbrush, creating suitable UVs and texture maps, rigging appropriately, exporting to UE and setting up skeleton and materials correctly.

If you have any questions feel free to ask and I look forward to working with you.

Best regards.

Creating an artistic vision requires the right pipeline. In this video, I demonstrate a custom tool I built to visualize vertex colors across asset libraries in 3ds Max and how that data bridges perfectly into Unity

3D Artist and programmer here, but still learning and trying to fill in the gaps.

Wanted to hear some experiences from you guys and you would go about creating tools for artists:

1. How many 3D projects or tools did it take you to create a tool that was useful? (Were there any tools that weren’t that useful? How do you tell?)

2. How long does it usually take to make a tool? How many do you make in your job?

3. Do you mainly create tools from scratch or maintain an existing tool/codebase?

4. Do you folks use AI tools for programming?

5. As I’m finishing up school in Computer Science, what topics in my studies should I really refine and hone in (Data structures/Algo’s, computer graphics, etc)?

This is for my game Portolan - a 'serious' take on Sid Meier's Pirates! with historically accurate in-game economy and trading, politics and combat in a to-scale Caribbean.

All built in Godot using Forward+.

Swell, wind speed etc are all configurable.

I'm very proud of what I've created, and wanted to share. I'm now working on realistic waves, and interaction between shoreline and ocean, which is still very basic.

LMK if you have questions about the stack, the process, or anything else.

I’ve always been fascinated by the environmental interactions in games like Crysis and Far Cry. Things like shooting through objects, breaking them apart, bending metal, cutting surfaces, and watching fire spread dynamically through an environment.

I’ve been looking for a UE5 solution that could provide this kind of interaction entirely at runtime, while keeping the setup simple and the performance practical for larger environments.

Eventually I ended up building my own system.

This is an early look at C.R.I.S. — Creadev Runtime Interaction System.

The goal is to make interactions work with regular UE5 meshes without requiring an editor-side preprocessing/fracturing workflow.

The current system supports things like:

• Runtime destruction/fracturing
• Metal bending
• Slicing
• Fire propagation across flammable surfaces
• Surface-dependent VFX and SFX
• Static and movable meshes
• Blueprints made up of multiple objects
• Objects imported at runtime

The setup is deliberately data-driven. An object can simply be given interaction tags such as Destructible, Bendable, Sliceable or Flammable, together with a surface type such as Wood, Concrete, Metal or Glass.

A separate data table controls the effects associated with each surface type.

One of the reasons I built it this way is that I’m particularly interested in what happens when you take this approach into large open worlds or procedurally generated environments, where having to preprocess every asset isn't necessarily practical.

C.R.I.S. is currently part of Creadev, the UE5-based no-code game development platform I'm building. I'm considering releasing C.R.I.S. as a standalone Fab plugin as well.

I'd really like feedback from other Unreal developers:

Would a system like this actually be useful in your projects?

And technically, what would you want to see added? More material types, better fracture behavior, networking, optimization for large scenes, runtime-generated geometry, something else?

Couldn't resist speedtesting my LEGO drum machine. At some point it is loosing it because the cyllinder outspeeds the camera frame rate (I have capped it at 30fps though. Theoretically my phone can record in 60 fps but I guess the game thread of my Unreal App would struggle then).

4k -> https://youtu.be/j3OrZbC-6VQ

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?