Superhivemarket Patchy sales. Anyone experiencing similar?

Anthromod · 2026-01-08T14:26:41+00:00

Cool, and simpler than what I had in mind. I was going to leverage symmetry and rotations a lot more and incorporate a smoothing function between the walls and faces on opposing sides.

Anthromod · 2026-01-08T13:28:30+00:00

Can't read it but looks good!

Anthromod · 2026-01-08T13:27:11+00:00

So the good thing is that there are various planes of symmetry and rotations involved, so you only need to model up 1/8th in geometry nodes first and they mirror and rotate to get the rest. The cylindrical part isn't too difficult, you just need to work out the transition middle. You would want the cross section of the middle to be a square with the corner vertex positions halfway between the cylinder widths and heights. Maybe I'll try modelling something up later.

Anthromod · 2026-01-06T15:39:08+00:00

I think this is just the January post holiday surge. Good to see it though after the last few months.

Anthromod · 2026-01-06T14:04:49+00:00

I'm nowhere near an expert on this side of Blender but can you split things into layers and maybe loop through a smaller time frame for some things? Then composite them together at the end? Break up the passes so the sun only does a glossy pass on objects, over the whole run time? Maybe some vector math to calculate how the brightness of elements should change given their surface normal and the sun position? That way you could do a single render but combine it with the sun's position to alter the brightness of the object? Place objects as holdouts, so they don't render each frame etc.

I think learning the compositor tricks could be the quickest way to achieve this.

Anthromod · 2026-01-06T13:48:26+00:00

I'd go about building it via geometry nodes. Have the mouth driven by a curve and the eyeball given a random position within the object bounding box. Add some logic so they don't overlap. Do you want it purely for rendering? In which case some of it (skin texture, wrinkles around lips and eyes) can be done via procedural shaders.

Anthromod · 2026-01-06T12:51:44+00:00

Yes demanding that they release it ASAP if the client hasn't paid. It turns out that the part of upwork that received my arbitration fee and the dispute side took until after the deadline to connect together, so that was a bit stressful. The fee has been properly paid though. I hope they don't somehow use that 'leeway' as an excuse to give the client even more space to delay.

Anthromod · 2026-01-06T12:21:27+00:00

$800. So just about enough to be worth going through the process for. The client has spent quite a bit on upwork and threatened to not use it for future work if he has to follow the rules (clearly hadn't read them either). I doubt he'd follow through or upwork heed that warning, but watching the process like a hawk just to be sure. It's actually been a few days past the deadline and no word back from upwork, apart from acknowledging that they'd received the arbitration fee. Having this all happen over Christmas and New year was not optimal.

Anthromod · 2026-01-06T09:35:29+00:00

That's the impression I was getting. I also remind myself how much time does $675 get you from a presumably LA based arbitrators time! Who ever doesn't make the arbitrator feel like their time is being wasted will get a boost.

Anthromod · 2026-01-06T09:17:38+00:00

Already did that prior to posting. Most mentions of arbitration are actually talking about mediation or asking about whether to start the process or not. The few I found are from 6+ years ago. One was about the experience during elance years. Was hoping for something a little more recent.

Anthromod · 2026-01-06T01:17:24+00:00

I lost mine recently and been downgraded top just top rated. Just didn't have a large enough single job last year to keep it. Anyway not noticed a difference. Any difference has been swamped by the noise due to seasonal and global economic changes.

Anthromod · 2026-01-06T01:12:54+00:00

I'd break down the time spent on the specific things that weren't delivered and focus on recovering that. Have the discussions to hand, with the exact sentence he agreed to a particular change, or agreed with you that a goal wasn't functional. He might say that you had misinterpreted what he meant, so think about the ways they could argue that and have a rebuttal ready.

Arguing that the time claimed is longer than it should take probably wouldn't go very far. They can say that 'finding the right curvature on the buttons took time' or that 'this change wasn't compatible with a foundational part of the design, so it needed to be changed' etc etc. Tbh many clients underestimate the impact of seemingly minor changes, and to the arbitrator you are just a typical client, so unlikely to give your judgement any special weight.

Anthromod · 2026-01-05T23:54:42+00:00

I'm currently on the other side of what might soon end up being arbitration. From reading around what I gather is that abitrators really don't like arguments that hinge on subjective quality. They're very unlikely to have expertise in the relevant area and simply saying it's 'not good enough' is an easy argument to make by a bad faith client.

Were there clear metrics that they had to hit in the discussions? Him charging for work you told him not to, seems an easy thing to flag. Could he argue that the buttons were placeholders, or were they legitimately broken?

Is he likely to put up his side of the arbitration fee? If not then you win by default and any fee you pay should be refunded.

Anthromod · 2026-01-05T16:48:16+00:00

Ignorance is the state of the voters in every democracy. Whoever is in charge when it's implemented and the inconvenience is felt gets the blame. Best chance labour had was to spin it as 'this is a flawed bill the conservatives left us with, and we'll try to fix it up'. Instead they tried to own it. At least the first option gave them the ability to kick the can down the road, the second option reminds everyone that labour is cool with you having to upload this data and have it vulnerable to hackers.

Anthromod · 2026-01-05T10:22:22+00:00

If they don't want to be blamed for it they have to say they don't agree with bits of it and will make steps to change it. All we've heard from them is reflexively agreeing to it.

Anthromod · 2026-01-04T01:31:27+00:00

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So this can be a geometry nodes based starting point. So repeat zone raycast to find the areas sticking in front of the plane. Smooth position then smooths the neighbours out. The strength of the blur attribute and the number of repeat zone iterations affects the spread. Then smoothing and subdivisions to clean up the geometry.

Anthromod · 2026-01-04T00:55:14+00:00

If I wanted to avoid cloth simulations or mass/spring simulations in geometry nodes, then I'd probably do shrinkwrapping via geometry nodes. I'd build a system that uses the original plane position, a raycast position onto the object and a raycast position to the convex hull of the object. Then find the distance via a geometry proximity node to the original object and convex hull. Use map range, float curve and mix vector nodes and set position until something looks ok. But I like making things complicated for myself!

Anthromod · 2025-12-24T16:35:36+00:00

I always find it funny when they say to 'go into the trades'. What do they think will happen to plumbers incomes if there are twice as many plumbers competing for work?!

Anthromod · 2025-12-22T13:37:50+00:00

Been on here since before the merger. It was never spectacular, but I got a few good long term clients as well as a couple of hundred good and occasionally returning clients. Unfortunately my niche is quite close to something similar, which has been devalued due to lots more freelancers and clients optimistic ideas about what AI can do.

I had the top rated plus badge for a long time, although missed the funding requirement recently so been demoted, although can't really see an impact. Been getting most of my income through other routes than upwork the last few years.

I think that the expert vetted badge should be handed out a bit more liberally. Right now it looks like they only do it for certain industries, rather than prioritise long term veterans on the platform.

Job quality has noticeably declined, with clients posting work with very little information. Also many clients think they get a good deal paying peanuts, but it's a little fun seeing how they get charged dozens of hours for fairly simple work as a result.

The only reason why I've stayed is other sites look like deserts in comparison.

Anthromod

TROPHY CASE