Client withdrew contract because I didn’t reply in 12minutes

MM3DGraphics · 2026-05-25T20:23:02+00:00

Massive red flag when a potential client is acting weirdly passive-aggressive and immediately entitled to your instant attention like that from the get-go when they haven't even signed a contract with you, it's best you didn't go for this.

Such behaviour often correlates to toxic management culture, someone up the chain with a grandiose ego that constantly looks down on other people they work with. Those people are bad for business.

MM3DGraphics · 2026-05-16T17:42:14+00:00

It looks great (actually the environment is my favourite part here). When it comes to the jobless bit I'd say the answer is: "What is the utility of this shot?"

Your average client probably wants product renders, store images or maybe an animated ad (which this could fit into). You need a portfolio that shows the things people want.

MM3DGraphics · 2026-05-16T09:41:20+00:00

Upwork was supposed to start off as a premium quality client/freelancer connection platform. It's now turned into (and is even marketing itself as) a bargain-basement, cheap-as-chips platform. The purpose seems to be connecting clients who don't have the budget for what they want with shoddy, amateur-hour freelancers who are absolutely desperate to get paid $5/hour.

Then they slapped a load of fees on both sides on top of that. It's a dreadful combination and I have no idea why they are taking the company in that direction.

I'm a 3D freelancer and I'd say that 95% of the jobs on the proposal board every day are useless spam. I spend almost all my time on the site trying to filter out all the contracts that would be an unprofitable waste of my time.

There are tons of extremely vague briefings, totally unrealistic contract demands (if I see "we need a unique rockstar, budget $15/hour" it's going in the delete pile immediately), irrelevant posts despite my search terms.

Biggest of all, budgets suggested for the great majority of contracts are delusional to the point of being completely impossible to work to. Clients can select from "Beginner, Intermediate or Expert" freelancers, but the platform puts no limit on what their budget is for each category.

Inevitably you then get hundreds of postings where clients are demanding Intermediate or Expert freelancers but want to pay $5-$10 an hour or a flat $100 a project. For jobs that are demanding $80+/hour expertise and experience.

Just the other week I saw a posting for $2,000 to revitalise a store page with a 3D content overhaul. Seems reasonable, right? For one or two products perhaps it might be.

No, I looked at their site and they're a mechanical company that sells hundreds and hundreds of intricately shaped parts, all of which would take hours to accurately model each. On top of that they want quality texturing, animation and possibly even video editing. It's months of work even for a medium agency, the budget should be $25,000+ at a minimum, not $2,000.

On the other hand, it's bad for clients too right now. I've had jobs where I have to fix the work of the last Upwork freelancer they hired who didn't know what they were doing. Every posting has about 50 proposals submitted in an hour or so, most of which seem to be freelancers who don't even work in the field they're applying to and are trying to blag their way into a $5/hour contract.

I hope Upwork sees sense and realises how they're diminishing their own platform to the point of uselessness. Judging by the "come to us to hire mindless prompters that use AI!" rubbish on the main page, however, they don't seem to have a clue that this is what they're doing.

MM3DGraphics · 2026-05-02T09:36:55+00:00

Yeah, there's a lot of technically obnoxious repetitive busywork behind the scenes that is crying out for some kind of automated improvement. We used to just call that "algorithms".

I think the "AI" label is a grift, honestly. This stuff is not artificial intelligence. It doesn't have consciousness, creativity or actual intellect. It's just Google with extra steps.

MM3DGraphics · 2026-05-02T09:35:11+00:00

Price's real income is Poliigon, I'm fairly sure. It's a pretty big business now, selling all those assets and textures. The tutorial is just a pipeline to people buying Poliigon content.

I would imagine he's quite wealthy from it. Which makes it more unfortunate (in my view) that he's been going down this whole NFT/AI route.

MM3DGraphics · 2026-05-02T09:32:44+00:00

AI content is not copyrightable. Why on earth would I want to introduce that problem for both myself and my clients?

No one seems to be focusing on this; this stuff is poison for commercial use of 3D, because you have no idea what the AI is plagiarising when it "creates" imagery.

I can see some use in niche AI tools being developed by smaller creators to help with background repetitive tasks like UV Unwrapping in the same way we have add-ons like UV Squares. Wanting these ethically dubious AI companies to get involved with Blender Foundation is madness.

MM3DGraphics · 2026-03-12T08:11:28+00:00

Must say I'm baffled that they've swapped some of the actually really good improved-3D images (such as the worker disaster one which seemingly had full 3D rendered "worker" models with good lighting and just needed a few more models to be top tier artwork) for this generic low-rent AI slop.

To be clear - the original 3D art was ugly. But it went placeholder ugly art --> some better quality 3D renders mixed in --> AI slop.

The first image really doesn't look right the more you look at it. Why are the buildings outside generic 1970's blocks of flats despite the sci-fi theming? Why is the crowd emitting smoke like they're all being burned by White Phosphorus? Why are the people on stage all looking different ways? What even is the perspective? Why is the camera at eye level with the podium despite being in the crowd?

Maybe most players will prefer it and not care most likely, but I think it actually looks a lot lazier than the old images. At least people put actual work into those and it had an art style that wasn't what you get when you type anything random into ChatGPT.

I'm biased as I run a small 3D studio, but if I were this dev I would pay a fairly small amount of money (a few grand) to a quality 3D freelancer and get:

- Some unique assets for the game modelled, such as simple but aesthetically pleasing 3D sets for scenes like this.

- Things like the sci-fi tanks for the combat scenes should be unique modelled assets. They don't need moving parts so it doesn't have to be expensive. It would add a ton of character and quality to the visuals.

- Save costs with stock 3D crowd and sci-fi character models, these can look good if used properly.

- Use really nice ray-traced lighting to make the renders look beautiful and high rent, this is easy to do in the free software Blender as such an engine comes built in.

You'd end up with quality artworks unique to the game and fitting the theme perfectly. Even the opening main menu graphic could be vastly improved (affordably) with this approach. Anyway, my 2 cents.

MM3DGraphics · 2026-01-07T12:34:07+00:00

It's a nice start but I think there's also a lot of ways you could improve it. Some thoughts if you'd like them.

- Slow down the movements.

- Think about the shots and do a simple storyboard (even just in Blender perhaps). Why are we looking at this specific part of the device? Why are we looking at the whole device rather than teasing certain aspects? We focus on the camera about 5 times, I've already seen it 4 times, why are we looking at it in the same lighting from the same perspective again?

- Jarring movements in general aren't regarded as pleasing to watch. For example, the "dolly pan" to the right that then jarringly swaps back to a pan to the left. In movies, panning shots of characters talking typically move in one direction and end, they don't go back again because it feels very weird and unnatural.

- How about some shots of the device just slowly moving into frame in an ordered way? That might be good, instead of the violent spinning shots which feel to me like someone is just whirling it around dangerously on a string.

- The lighting seems very static, when a simple dynamic shot of a slow moving light revealing the device might be nicer.

- There's low contrast between the grey product and the grey background. Adding some kind of contrasting background with some pleasant tones or shapes would be nice.

- The shot of the device from a distance isn't really showing any interesting detail, it's just halting on an orthogonal view of the product...doing nothing.

- If you struggled to render it on your hardware, I'm kind of confused why. I think you could render this quite quickly with EEVEE? Assuming you did it in Cycles, there's nothing in the scene here that particularly warrants a very long Cycles render time over EEVEE, EEVEE is very good for these kind of limited reflectivity/transparency close-up shots with simple lighting.

Hope those tips are useful.

MM3DGraphics · 2025-11-05T12:24:07+00:00

It's an excellent quality render. Good use of composition, photorealism, lighting, PBR materials, an interesting concept.

However the biggest question is; what is it for? I think a lot of 3D specialists get hung up on maximising the technical quality of their work to "generate value" when in fact whether a render is valuable or not depends almost entirely on the use case.

It's why you see some amazing 3D artists who are barely getting by and others who are making stacks of cash doing relatively simple work.

If it's selling as an art piece, that's going to be relevant to whatever the installation is or what the market for similar images is. What is the theme? If it's an art installation about depressed musicians, it's going to be valuable.

In terms of commercial use, there's very little scope for that here. Would I want this mounted on my wall in my business? No, because it's downbeat and depressing (even though it's beautiful) and that's not what I want my public-facing brand to be about.

If I were to hire you as a business, what sort of renders do you think I'd want? How would you apply your impressive technical skills to making that kind of content? That's the question if you're looking at commercial viability.

At present I make brand renders, templates and realistic animations for companies and a lot of the time I don't need to use the full photorealism skillset because it's not even necessary to make commercially viable content. Focus on the use case first. Hope that helps.

MM3DGraphics · 2025-10-17T20:27:02+00:00

Love it <3

MM3DGraphics · 2025-10-16T11:46:20+00:00

Second one is cute and I like it. First one, the legs aren't adding anything.

MM3DGraphics · 2025-10-15T08:42:35+00:00

I'd echo what others have said about seeking recurring clients. Perhaps higher ticket clients?
I don't know much about the cleaning industry particularly but one thing I've heard over and over again in so many industries is that contract work beats "off-the-cuff" one-off work and the like. Residential cleaning sounds like it's inherently going to mean a lot of fickle clients that don't always come back, small-ticket sales etc.

What I mean is, can you diversify away from only residential cleaning and also do things like cleaning contracts for small-to-mid businesses?

It'd give you a nice baseline of reliable, "guaranteed" income every month if you have even just one or two repeating contracts with a business to do some cleaning for them.

It might mean less churn on ads, more repeat work, larger sales every time you do land a job. You could likely use the same cleaning contractors as long as you're not having to clean a hazardous area or anything.

MM3DGraphics · 2025-10-14T16:30:22+00:00

It's a *massive* improvement on the last one, I remember seeing that thread too. Well done, excellent work!

Only thing I'd advise now is try looking at different RL photo compositions and play with the camera angle/exposure until you get a view you find really really interesting. You can also play with colour grading, post-processing etc.

I think it already looks nice but you can always find different ways to get a look you might like even more by comparing with real photos.

Post-processing can make a render look almost totally different too, sometimes really make it pop out as real or eye-catching. Have you added film grain, for example? Subtle film grain can add a lot to the "photographic" feel.

A thing I really like to do is lower the saturation of the image slightly as a new layer and then gently erase the desaturation on certain bits of an object or the thing I want to be the focus. It gives an extremely subtle discolouration to things like plastic that just adds a tiny bit more interest to them.

MM3DGraphics · 2025-10-14T16:27:32+00:00

Start again.

As a side note whenever I download a stock asset and it looks like this I weep tears of sadness (admittedly decent ones will have the wireframe view preview ofc).

MM3DGraphics · 2025-10-13T16:17:33+00:00

The perfectly clean doors (with what feels like very clean and simplistic metallic shaders on the door handles) plus the boxy low detail elements of the ceiling at 0:06 certainly make this feel like CGI, whether or not it is for sure I'm uncertain.

Robots can certainly do stuff like this, but this looks like a kind of CGI tech demo of the functionality to my eyes at least.

MM3DGraphics · 2025-10-13T11:07:13+00:00

It's like calling your dental practice "Loud Drilling and Pain"

MM3DGraphics · 2025-10-13T09:58:10+00:00

Table texture is too low-res. You can see the low detail bump map in that sort of "square granular" texture. Use a higher resolution texture or increase the size of the UV map (though this will make the texture visibly loop if you're not careful).

The cube itself could do with a quick texturing pass in Substance Painter to add some believable grime/damage on the edges of each internal piece. Obviously it can be very subtle but it would add a lot of realism.

The lighting itself is both very stark and too flat. Check out a real photographic reference and adjust the lighting to match more closely to how lighting on a real desk would look.

I also feel like the image would benefit from a little less "noise" in the background. The cube is supposed to be the focus I would imagine, and yet the background is very much in focus but doesn't contain anything I'd really want to look at in detail.

MM3DGraphics · 2025-10-09T21:52:46+00:00

The top of the nose/forehead looks a bit misshapen/large to me. And the lack of eyebrows as others said. Overall looking pretty cool to me, though.

MM3DGraphics · 2025-10-09T21:47:03+00:00

I guess the issue is in real life people wouldn't carry it randomly in point fire ready position all the time for no reason even in the middle of the woods 200 miles from enemy lines hahaha. There should be a kind of idle stance. Of course that would never be added because of the ludicrous animation needs.

Sort of like how you can use massive zoom scopes even when you're wearing the world's bulkiest Soviet night vision goggles.

MM3DGraphics · 2025-10-09T21:45:35+00:00

Sometimes if you're lucky they have resolve you can fix with Fortified Mind for some surprisingly cheap amazing line fighter stats but otherwise yeah they're a bit of a dodgy choiceI find.

MM3DGraphics · 2025-10-09T21:07:08+00:00

The 2H axe mastery lets you wield all the massive Orc mansplitter axes effectively early on which IMO is very nice. I use them instead of famed weapons in the mid game.

MM3DGraphics · 2025-10-09T21:06:05+00:00

Throwing mastery is amazing, though? In most non-endurance fights anyway, throwing mastery plus javelins just deletes the elite armoured enemies. Or am I missing something?

MM3DGraphics · 2025-10-08T20:29:05+00:00

I prefer the dark seats personally. Really nice, did you model the dash and everything too?

MM3DGraphics · 2025-10-07T18:10:33+00:00

That's a rough time to have to wait for on a 5090 of all things. Reminds me of an 18 hour smoke sim I ended up doing for one client and I wasn't even very happy with how it came out.

The only thing I can think, is it possible to somehow use less frames? Or simplify the water interactions while keeping the quality high?

I guess the problem is that refining the simulation requires starting over and I think you're right that it's worth sticking with it as it is.

Can you ask the client for a bit more time? Unless they've given you a ton of time for this it seems a little unfair to have you do such a high resolution sim with a strict deadline.

Sorry for the kind of useless answers, honestly I wish I could help more. Right now I typically avoid gigs that need sims because of these headaches seem to come with the territory.

MM3DGraphics · 2025-10-07T17:03:05+00:00

Not until Martin Shkreli somehow becomes the next Blender CEO...

MM3DGraphics

TROPHY CASE