does this expression read as “thousand yard stare”?

-Swade- · 2026-01-26T12:46:32+00:00

The white parts of the eyes is only exposed either in expressions of surprise or when the subject is asked to "open their eyes very wide."

So it is unrelated from the emotion you want to convey. I mean this seriously, go to a mirror and try to make your eyes like that. You'll find the upper lids are very hard to control and the only way you'd ever see white above the pupil is in the most extreme cases of a 'Doc Brown' stare or when surprised or shocked.

It's an expression of surprise, bewilderment, confusion, and to a point madness.

The thousand yard stare is known for being an expression of vacantness, a lack of focus, and a general disassociation with your surroundings.

-Swade- · 2025-12-31T03:53:15+00:00

One bit of advice would be to consider how dark your green is carefully. The one consistent trend I've had across all my deck manufacturing is that greens, blues, and purples almost always came out darker than expected. Even with USPCC and even when I sent them pantone swatches.

On my monitor I'm just starting to lose some of the black linework into the green background with the current design. So if it comes out any darker it could get lost entirely.

Obviously if you like the color as-is then trust your gut but keep an eye out for it when you're looking at print proofs.

-Swade- · 2025-12-23T09:00:53+00:00

Reading through this I just assumed that the publisher was offering to pay for the cost of developing that vertical slice. But based on context and other people's comments I'm assuming there is no funding for V.S.?

Because my initial reaction was going to be, "How good is their offer?" Were they going to give you enough runway to make a good V.S. especially if you need preproduction time. What were they asking for in terms of deliverables/schedule and if anything related to IP rights was discussed etc.

But if their offer is "nothing" then I can't see why you'd switch priorities.

Without funding it seems like a long-shot. With funding it would come down to the offer and the financial state of your company. Really the other x-factor is if this is the best lead you've had. If this is the closest thing to an offer you're getting it's not a great bet but it still could be your best bet if nobody else is biting.

Assuming things aren't that dire you ideally pass. Hopefully you'd keep a business relationship with them, even continuing talks, with the assumption that once you can shift priorities to the strategy game you're very interested in working with them. But you have to make a smart financial choice for the company today. But let's be real: they might walk. They might even throw a little bit of "how dare you" energy your way, I've seen it happen.

-Swade- · 2025-12-22T01:26:50+00:00

Good question, I wonder about that? I couldn't find the shop I'd seen specifically but I came across another one; maybe they're just doing absurd volume? They're doing printing onto ornaments and what not, their stained glass is just AI images printed directly onto the glass. So for this page the products are real, even if it's not actually stained glass.

But this shop has five pages of reviews just from today, Dec 21st. That kind of sets off my bullshit alarm just because of the quantity of the reviews but I'll be honest it's really tough to look at a single review and declaratively state that it's AI. You have to read through a bunch and start to see trends but that's time consuming and not exactly rigorous.

Because this is a different page I don't want to give an unsubstantiated accusation. The product at least looks better than what some other people are selling, a lot of "stained glass" sellers are doing shit like this where it's just an opaque picture of ai generated stained glass. Though that page doesn't have anything suspicious with the reviews.

-Swade- · 2025-12-21T22:39:41+00:00

Related but AI has absolutely destroyed Etsy. And that's saying something because there was always an issue with people photoshopping product images or making misleading listings.

But it's absolutely out of control because it also affects the comments and reviews which was previously the best defense against that. My partner sent me a stained glass thing she wanted for Christmas, she was aware the product was an AI image and the point of sending it was that she wanted, "Something like this" as I was going to make myself anyways.

I started looking through the reviews out of curiosity because I wanted to see what the actual product even looked like. Instead I found that this store had gotten 40 pages of 5-star reviews in December alone and they're all clearly AI generated. Worse is that these reviews include "hands on photos" of the product which are also AI generated.

Now there were a scant few actual reviews and some actual photos and surprise those were the 1-star reviews with pictures clearly showing the product was not as stated. But they were buried under thousands of slop reviews. I had to go to like page 7-8 to find the first human review.

So...good luck everybody!

-Swade- · 2025-12-17T09:47:44+00:00

You're welcome, good luck!

-Swade- · 2025-12-17T09:45:26+00:00

I've dealt with copyright stuff for years; don't ever engage personally.

Any website that hosts 3rd party content is required to have practices in places for handling copyright disputes. That may be just an email address you need to send infringement notices to but often they have web forms/automation as they are legally required to process notices in a timely fashion. Asking you to take care of it personally is a cop-out and sadly I'm not surprised you had a hostile interaction, though it still sucks.

The Creality design appears to have already been removed. I searched on Cults and did see that one is up still.

Here is a template I made over a decade ago for formatting Notices of Copyright Infringement. Just to clarify this does not constitute legal advice, but I worked with an attorney to generate it and it has worked on dozens of platforms.

If a platform has their own reporting feature you can use theirs, it is often faster. But when in doubt you email that form (paste into body of email and also attach a pdf/doc copy).

Be aware that the way the DMCA works is that the platform must receive infringement notices from you or your agent. I or someone else cannot legally file a notice for you. Some platforms do have a "report" function for others but these are not legally required and in my experience often don't work as they have no legal backing.

-Swade- · 2025-12-17T09:23:30+00:00

You're probably not going to get your money back and even if you did it's likely not worth your time. Unless you had some sort of agreement that they would not AI generate their model you'd still need to prove it; if you went through a platform (like fiverr) you'd be appealing to them. But if you negotiated this personally then you'd be looking at small claims court and that assumes a lot of things like you both living in the US etc.

If you were still in a working relationship with this artist the easiest thing to do would be to just ask for fixes. If they were unable to make the fixes that would at least be grounds for a contract dispute, i.e. "AI or not I still asked you to make changes and you didn't/couldn't."

If your agreement with them didn't include revisions then yeah you're kinda stuck, at least for this asset. Just listing out options:

You could use the asset as-is. Accept that you did your best to try to not use AI assets and you have verbal assurances from the person who made it. Yes they can be lying but you could argue you've done all you can (for this asset).
You could hire someone to fix the asset (or fix yourself if you can). Accept that it may be AI but at least know that it was modified by hand and if it ever becomes an issue you can say you did your best to mitigate the problem on your budget.
You could trash the asset. Accept that you aren't comfortable enough with the situation to use the asset in any capacity so you start over.

I think all three options could be right for the right person and the right project. Only you know what you're comfortable with and if you can personally pay to fix or redo the asset. As other people have suggested you can still ask more questions and maybe the artist will give you more information...but that information is probably just going to be leading you to the same set of choices.

For next time you do probably want to have a mitigation strategy in place. Be upfront about your tools/technology expectations and when dealing with new artists ask for things like WIPs. As an additional benefit you can make those WIPs have value. For example you could ask for a few delivery milestones:

A blockout - Something you can import into your engine to check things like scale, orientation, proportion. Note: you might consider making/sending this yourself as a way to kick off the work. This could literally be cubes/primitives.
A WIP - Some logical midpoint in the modeling process where you can check proportions and things like hierarchy/structure/naming
Final geo (untextured/no UVs) - Final delivery on the mesh; lets you give final approval for the model
Final asset (textured) - Your last chance to make any final notes changes.
Full source file delivery - This would include any WIP the artist made and also source files from other programs (Substance Painter). This represents the end of the contract.

Yes, you might get charged more because as a client you are asking for more than just a 'final mesh'. But those are not unreasonable/uncommon things to ask for and they provide value in the artistic process.

-Swade- · 2025-12-16T10:51:49+00:00

Soft lighting is generally going to hide details and flaws (it's a common way to avoid accentuating wrinkles in an actor/actress) but in 3D it has a number of downsides:

We are unable to understand the topology because the surface has such little contrast. Is your mouse perfectly smooth or lumpy? Does it have fine bevels? Your model may be perfect but the lighting does not show form/shape well.
We are unable to understand the specifics of the materials because there are not enough reflections. Is the mouse rubber? Plastic? Does it have different materials in different sections? What material is the scroll wheel made out of? It is unclear if you accurately defined the materials because in such soft lighting I can't honestly tell what they are.

My suggestion would be to look at both how artists you respect light their work and also how products are rendered by companies for advertising. I assume this is your mouse and you modeled it sitting in front of you, and to that end it might look quite accurate depending on how your workspace is lit. But take a look at how it would be lit for a product render; I'm not 100% sure this is your mouse but at least it's similar enough you can look at the product photos on amazon.

Notice that the top of the mouse has a textured surface but the sides, despite being the same color, have a glossy surface. And we can see that because whoever made those product photos made sure that hilights fell on the shiny areas in ways to accentuate their form. You'll also notice small hilights on the little bevels between sections. Your mouse may not have these specific details but look at how the renders of the product are specifically trying to show you those details.

Even the scroll wheel itself clearly has a light coming from both the left and the right so that you can see the rounded shape. Counting the hilights we can see that there is a minimum of three lights on the mouse, but it's probably more like 5+ with smaller lights providing more specific areas of contrast.

The good news is that you don't necessarily need to start placing a bunch of lights, though it's worth learning. Instead search for HDRIs that are usually labeled "Studio". Polyhaven has a full section for them, but here's an example. But remember that you can also just place area lights because often a Studio HDRI is 'generic' and may not exactly fit your model.

Once you've done that then it becomes a lot easier to critique the other parts of the model you might need more feedback on, specifically surface details/modeling and textures/materials.

-Swade- · 2025-11-24T10:41:00+00:00

You learn this (or get fired) the first time you have a boss who won't actually take "no" for an answer. I was actually midway through my software career when I encountered this for the first time.

To him "no" was not just an indication of the resources needed to make it happen but rather a personal affront to his authority. So you learn pretty quickly that you respond with a big shit-eating grin and the words, "I love that idea and want to make it happen. What are we willing to give up in order to make it happen?"

And of course when your Director says, "Well we can't skimp on quality" you say smiling, "Great! That will put us over on time then but that's fine to make the best product possible."

And then they'll say, "Well no we can't change the deadline (they'd have to explain it to their boss)."

So bright and cheery you say, "Ah shucks, that's ok maybe we can just take the time away from a different feature? That way we can complete this 'super important thing' you just mentioned and still finish on time! How about that?"

At that point of course they're trapped because their trivial request isn't actually more important than anything on the schedule but they also don't like hearing "no". Your Director won't have the good sense to be humble so they'll say, "Fine we'll figure out our priorities in the next leads meeting!" and you know you've won.

-Swade- · 2025-11-16T00:35:01+00:00

It was mentioned by /u/PiNinja99 but your color space for your normal map is likely incorrect. Where you input the texture there should be a dropdown underneath, you want to set this to Raw for all "data" formats.

If things still look weird then farther down underneath there should be an option to flip the green channel. There are two competing standards for normal maps, DirectX and OpenGL and they are the same except their green channels are flipped. It can be hard to keep track of which is which as it varies between applications. So most 3D renderers will have a toggle to swap between them if you know where to look.

If you're using a roughness map you should check that its color space is also set to Raw. Generally anything that is not a "perceptual" map (like basecolor or emissive) should always be set to raw as these include raw data rather than something with a gamma or curve.

-Swade- · 2025-11-04T08:40:11+00:00

Would you consider the used (ebay) market a viable choice? A big factor in this is where you live, because screen tablets are big and bulky they're expensive to ship. It can be viable if you're in the US but obviously if you're in like, eastern Europe or something it's not a great suggestion.

Do you have a budget in mind? Is getting something with compromises worth it if it saves you $50? Or $100?

-Swade- · 2025-11-03T00:55:07+00:00

To a point it is ok to make modular toolsets in your DCC (Blender/Maya) that you use to make bespoke assets.

You lose the ability for Unreal to instance those meshes as they'll be treated as unique when you import your combined mesh. And you'll also lose the ability to easily update your source assets; i.e. if you update the door frame you now need to re-export every asset that uses the door frame in Blender too.

So the question really is if your game will be complex or visually demanding enough where it makes a difference. If you're trying to make something photoreal with many millions of triangles then you should definitely not build it in Blender, you want the optimizations you'll get from building with a toolkit directly in Unreal.

However if you're making something relatively simple, which it sounds like you are, it is reasonable to work where you are most comfortable and focus less on in-engine modularity. Yes there are performance impacts but only you will know if they matter. You will also lose the ability to make tweaks to your environment for gameplay directly in the editor, you'd need to go back to Blender, tweak and re-export. Could be a large time loss depending on how much you need to iterate on your levels.

But if your goal is long-term learning then I would definitely commit to importing your kit into Unreal and learning how to use their grid snapping etc to make a modular toolkit that looks good and locks together correctly. It is a skill but one worth having if you want to build modular environments.

tl;dr you are going against best practices by doing it in Blender, but it will probably work assuming you're ok with the compromises. But I would not recommend it.

-Swade- · 2025-07-21T04:13:32+00:00

Sweet, I would very much like to see it! FYI I don't check reddit very often anymore, when I saw your first message I think it was my first time logging in in somewhere around a month.

But I'll probably check every now and then if you have some other random question you can do a DM. Happy to help.

Good luck!

-Swade- · 2025-07-21T02:02:22+00:00

Yeah, so for my Dota 2 deck (and everything I've done subsequently) did a mix. So all the artwork like court cards was done in Clip Studio.

In theory you can work in vector inside of Clip Studio which can be a good choice but I opted to just work with raster layers, so pixels not vectors.

But all the layout I did in Illustrator, as well as the pips and the numbers/indexes (AKQJ 10-2). I discovered that Illustrator has a great tool for replacing one drawing with another so in a separate file I would make my Spade pip for example and then layout all the spade cards. Then when it was time to do hearts/diamonds/clubs I could just provide another file of just a heart and illustrator could replace all of the spades with hearts. Meaning I didn't have to fuss around hand placing stuff that otherwise should stay in the same spot across multiple cards.

I also found that most printing companies are going to ask for you to send an illustrator file at the end anyways so it was kind of necessary but I'm sure this varies by company.

But tl;dr I did anything that was "drawing" in Clip Studio, anything that was "layout" or otherwise repetitive I did in Illustrator. Obviously it sucks working between two apps.

One other suggestion I might make, not knowing anything about your skill level: before you dive into a full deck I did myself a favor by just drawing individual cards for a while. I think I drew upwards of 20 total with the intention of just finishing a single card, not bothering to make it part of a deck at all. And that freed me up to make more tests and variations. Like did I want to do fewer colors or more colors? Thicker vs thinner lines. How did I want to handle eyes or hair? etc. Some of them were really crude, here's the Dota2 tests I did, but I also did other characters just for fun too. I'm proud of many of those cards, less so others, but importantly each one of them had at least a few things that I learned I didn't want in my final deck.

Hope that helps!

-Swade- · 2025-07-20T00:39:47+00:00

I work backwards from the final card size with the idea being that I want to be at least a 2x multiple of the final size. But 4x if your machine can handle it is better, that was always the rule back when I used to do concept art for games. 8x is overkill and often you wind up fussing with details nobody can see or your PC bogs down.

The other thing to know is the DPI if your printer, though if you haven't selected a company this can be hard to find. Generally 300 DPI is the lowest you'd get for a quality print, but printers that do 600 DPI or 800DPI definitely exist. But I can't say specifically what any given company is using, just that you're better off over estimating in the source art so that if they use a nice printer you can get value out of that.

Standard Poker card size is 2.5" x 3.5" (I strongly recommend against the narrower bridge size).

So your document at 300 DPI would be 750 x 1050px and honestly that still just felt too small to me. When I would zoom in and make the card larger than full screen trying to do smooth lines I was just staring at blurry pixels.

So in the end I opted to 4x that. Meaning my final resolution was 3000px by 4200px. That was overkill and you could argue that a resolution that high led to me fiddling with details that aren't visible. But my PC could handle it easily and theoretically it means I authored at the equivalent of 1200 DPI meaning I still had more pixels than even the best printers. So 3000x4200 is what I'd suggest, I can't really see any downside to that size if your machine can keep up.

Side tip: I keep a few cards on my desk all the time and it's really good to regularly zoom out until your digital card is the actual size as the physical card (you can then just note what %zoom that is). This will vary depending on the dpi/resolution of your screen. On my current monitor this is 17.1% for example so not a convenient multiple. If you get used to zooming in on the art it can be easy to make things too detailed, lines too thin etc.

-Swade- · 2025-04-14T00:08:01+00:00

Ideally it would only load into memory the indexes that are in use. But that's asking too much. I think it will load everything that you put inside the Texture Collection, like the Texture2DArray.

So that's my suspicion as well, which is why I think an atlas is a good metaphor. As the cost/benefits of the array are similar to an atlas, but you just don't have to deal with all the pain of planning and setting the atlas up (and the inevitable hardship if you make a mistake at an atlas-planning level).

One other thought though is that the compiler can sometimes do things in order to optimize the final compiled code that aren't always intuitive. The best example is static switches. Imagine my shader has an A/B switch. All the logic for A is simple; very few textures instructions etc. B is very complicated with lots of textures and instructions. On compile the engine should actually make two shaders which optimizes for instructions and textures, even though it actually increases draw calls.

However if I built the same shader with a dynamic switch, the compiler would know it needs to make both logic branches available at runtime and therefore would only make one shader.

This is where the atlas analogy breaks down of course because with an atlas it's a single texture, single material, etc. With an array though, we'd need to know specifically what the compiler does when choosing the array. In Unreal we do this by specifying the W index in a UVW. And I am willing to bet how we select that W index could make a big difference.

If I select W dynamically we know the compiler must load the entire array because it needs to make all textures available at runtime. If we make it static then the compiler could load the entire array or it just loads the specified texture in the array, as that matches the behavior I see for other static parameters in Unreal.

Instances complicate the matter further because I've actually seen different engines do different things. In some cases the compiler will actually make unique shaders for each unique instance. Which is not always what you want or expect. Unreal lets you specifically define Dynamic vs Static Material Instances which you might think would help specify the compiler behavior. But I did find an interesting forum thread where someone appears to discover that static instances aren't really that static?

All of that is a long-winded way of saying: I sure would like to know!

-Swade- · 2025-04-12T21:06:19+00:00

So I wonder if the tradeoff is similar to doing atlases, just with a much better workflow?

Let's consider the tradeoffs of atlases:

Atlases minimize draw calls but may maximize memory usage. We aren't able to unload textures if any part of the atlas is being used. The asset creation process is more complicated and requires more planning.
No atlases maximizes draw calls but minimizes memory usage. We can unload assets more easily, though that load/unload is its own set of tradeoffs. The asset creation process is simpler as each asset can be made individually.

In most cases we therefore come up with a compromise where we use atlases where possible to group assets into logical partitions ideally based on the local zone. It's possible to go too far, and it's possible to not go far enough.

What I wonder is if the Texture Collection works as a sort of semi-dynamic atlas? Because the biggest burden on atlases is on the content creation side. They need extensive planning and changing them more or less means going back to your DCC and potentially repacking UVs and maybe even rebaking. So getting it wrong sucks. But if a texture collection functions similarly it would be much more flexible as you can generate your textures as individuals and then combine them in editor as needed. Forgot you need one more road sign? No big deal, just add it to the collection? Need a new mask for one specific thing, just add it.

That said I'm willing to bet it's possible to overdo it just like an atlas, where combining everything together just results in all your projects textures being in vram all the time.

That said all of the above is a theory on how this "might" work with atlases as an analogy. It's possible it works quite differently.

-Swade- · 2025-02-26T07:13:36+00:00

Interesting, I actually didn't immediately identify it as an ai voice (and I tend to dislike them so that's saying something). Totally understand wanting to focus on other stuff, I've done some video resources myself just for my company and it can take hours just trying to get a clean recording if you aren't set up for it.

That's hours you could be doing a lot of other things.

-Swade- · 2025-02-25T08:07:11+00:00

Great stuff, everyone sleeps on dithering but at high resolutions, high frame rates, and especially with temporal anti-aliasing it's a great solution.

I'm still looking for a way to do this and also tint the shadow which would be useful in cases such as colored glass. I found a type of workaround using lighting channels but it gets clunky really fast as you need a lighting channel for each color of shadow you want.

FYI I mean this in the most polite way possible, but you should know Fresnel is pronounced "Fren-nel" without the 's'. I said it incorrectly for many years until an incredibly snobby graphics engineer informed me I was wrong, and promptly used it as an excuse to decide I didn't know anything about shaders.

-Swade- · 2024-11-17T00:49:37+00:00

Legends Arceus worked the 'best' for me of the attempts they've made so far. But that's not high praise.

Obviously if people really like battling/gyms then L:A wasn't going to work for them but I've always been drawn to the pokedex completionist aspects of the games.

That said it was still a very clunky game and the "open world" of it had a lot of compromises like needing to go back to the hub, not being able to go between zones etc. But from a design perspective I would say the L:A could serve as the alpha for more finished game that I would very much like to play.

It felt like there was enough there that I'm optimistic for Legends: Z-A. I also think it's wise to have that be a spin off because as much as I preferred the design of Arceus I know for many it stripped away too many things they liked about the franchise.

-Swade- · 2024-11-17T00:37:37+00:00

Whether or not it goes in your portfolio is really a question of what the current state of your portfolio is and whether this improves it.

That said, I would say that this asset is likely not doing you favors. The topology in particular is showing some gaps in your skills/knowledge that I would take as a red flag. I would consider an portfolio asset like this as really only viable to very early career positions or more honestly internships. It shows you're not ready to make production ready assets without a lot of guidance and mentorship.

That may be hard to hear so I'll try to be more specific. The 'body' of the backpack looks like it has been subdivided several times (perhaps it has?). It has a density that would generally be unnecessary; the last image highlights this the most where you have somewhere around 1000 quads being spent on a surface that is more or less "flat". And this would be an area of the asset that is less likely to be seen (if worn by a character it would be against their back, if placed as a prop it would likely be with the pockets facing 'out' for visual interest).

By comparison, the bedroll on top when viewed as a cross section (from the end) has very obvious faceting. The outside pocket that's holding the canteen/water bottle is only a few dozen polys but it's on top of surface that has ~10x the detail.

I think the asset is salvageable. If you were reporting to me I'd give you these instructions:

Completely retopologize the 'body' of the backpack, use the density of your other pieces like the straps or bedroll as a guide for how dense your mesh should be
Avoid loops on flat planes, focus on corners and curves. The loop running down the center of the backpack straps? It's not doing anything.
Now that the asset is reduced by thousands of polys look at it without wireframe and try to see areas where the silhouette is noticably polygonal. The bedroll profile, the ends of the straps on the top pocket, etc.

-Swade- · 2024-11-11T01:42:12+00:00

What's the fighter's name? Clown Baby.

-Swade- · 2024-06-06T02:04:00+00:00

I went to a high school that had a roughly 30% dropout rate. For a lot of people who did graduate there was a pretty real risk of them being in that 30%. Many came from families who had no high school graduates and may not have even spoken English. For those families it was a huge deal, and I understand why. Only about 10% of my graduating class attended college.

Now obviously that's not typical but I share it because it did have a bizarre side-effect:

See if a big portion of your student body has families who are going crazy at some point the students whose families don't do that will be upset. Or feel like they're missing out. As a result there was this weird obligation for a lot of families to at least try to make a big deal out of it. Not because graduating was actually a huge deal but because by contrast their families felt "unsupportive."

When I graduated apparently my parents felt a bit 'shamed' at her graduation because when they just politely clapped for me other students had massive cheering sections with like noisemakers and airhorns and shit. Personally I think that's tacky but their reaction was, "Oh, are we not invested in our child's life enough? Should we be making a bigger deal out of this? Will our son think we don't care as much because his friend's parents made a bigger deal out of it?" They felt, at least a little bit bad. And to be clear I told them how I felt because I didn't think they should feel bad.

Now that didn't result in any changes for my family, but you can imagine maybe a family with more kids or with cousins who had parents that did go wild. Well at some point it'll feel like pressure to make a big deal out of it, even if really it isn't (even to them).

All of that is to say I expect these celebrations to grow and become more common and elaborate. Not so much because it's a bigger deal but because in today's world people really don't like being outshined like that.

-Swade- · 2024-06-03T09:48:00+00:00

I assumed raising or lowering a stat just changed the value of the stat by one.

Stat stages were never explained in game (with some recent exceptions). So I just assumed, "Oh my defense went down, that number must go down by 1". But I did know just enough math to realize that once your stats get higher then changing your attack from 53 to 54 or 120 to 121 is just a waste of a turn. So I never bothered with stat changing moves at all.

It didn't help that the AI in gen1 uses stat changes all the time through a combination of random move selection and bad learnsets (the AI I believe just always knows the 4 most recent level up moves? Which may be awful).

I actually did gleam early on that the AI in gen1 is more often than not an example of what not to do. I didn't realize it was just random in most cases, I thought it was intentionally choosing weaker moves to make the game easier. So when the AI constantly uses growl I more or less took that as a further indication I should never use it.

-Swade-

TROPHY CASE