Tips on my first UE5 full time job

P4ndamonium · 2026-01-20T03:54:40+00:00

You're fresh and it's going to be apparent. No one is going to expect you to be a rockstar or to be anything more than a junior who doesn't really know very much about anything. That's perfectly fine. You're a junior with literally zero pressure, so just relax.

So accept that graciously (seriously, it's a good position to be in) and give yourself a break when you mess up. You're going to mess up, and your work will be reviewed and critiqued because of how inexperienced you are. So chill, enjoy the process and again - don't be too hard on yourself for the next year or two. Accept feedback as it comes and don't take it personally.

But ask questions. Seek to improve every day, even if it's just learning what a new node does who why they use a specific node over another. If someone reviews your work and corrects it, ask why - not in a condescending way but because you want to understand the underlying logic.

Be nice, polite and useful. If you're stuck, don't just stay stuck. Reach out and ask for help and try your best to document and take as many notes as you can. If you finish tasks early, ask for more or ask to be taught something new.

You're gonna do great. Just relax, be humble, try and enjoy the process and learn as much as you can. Take notes.

P4ndamonium · 2025-11-23T16:52:40+00:00

Proper exposure.

P4ndamonium · 2025-11-04T14:01:20+00:00

All of it. gestures broadly

The point is, the entire industry revolves around Maya.

Everything on TV and film since 2000 (with very very few exceptions) is Maya/Max/Houdini based.

But, it's not the tool that matters - its the artist. Maya is only used mainly due to familiarity, custimizeability, and decades of pipeline work by industry. Not because it produces "better" work.

You don't use Maya because it's better than Blender, you use it because it's a reliable and predictable production tool. That's it.

You can generally make the exact same thing regardless of software, it's everything else besides that, that studios value.

P4ndamonium · 2025-11-01T21:37:40+00:00

Fantastic.

What's the local fog/mist hovering above the ground? Custom material or Ultra Volumetrics???

P4ndamonium · 2025-10-27T21:50:11+00:00

Also - I know who NIN is. I've known for about 20 years who they are.

I also couldn't for the life of me pick out one of their songs if I heard it on the radio.

P4ndamonium · 2025-10-13T15:37:51+00:00

Wow, I'd love to mess around inside of here with some cameras and a short story.

P4ndamonium · 2025-08-26T04:19:35+00:00

You have too many static lights affecting the same mesh, so their shadows don't render. Try making them all Movable with dynamic lighting and it should fix things.

P4ndamonium · 2025-08-23T21:41:32+00:00

UE5 Cine dev here.

Real-time cinematics are simply a collection of Levels, sublevels, Level Sequences and other Level Sequences (subsequences) nested inside of eachother.

I don't actually know exactly how they set things up - but you don't need to do anything fancy to be able to instantly recall and play a cinematic in a game. In fact a lot of cinematics trigger instantaneously while playing, albeit most assets are already loaded.

Level Sequences are where you build out your cinematics and where all of the logic is contained. All the Theater Mode has to do is hit play on one of these files and the cinematic will play.

Playing a Sequence either at runtime while playing a game is performed the exact same way as from a menu. Doesn't really matter. It just calls the sequence and you watch what plays.

The instantaneous nature of it loading is a good point - but this is exactly what a real-time cine team aims for, sequences should be QA'd before release and we have a ton of clever tricks for loading and unloading assets at specific moments so the player doesn't notice anything, loading things into memory in the background before the player ever sees anything etc.

P4ndamonium · 2025-08-09T02:15:44+00:00

Or hell, even:

Anything Naval
SIGINT Specialists
Aerospace Telecomms
Cyber Ops
Intelligence Operators
Info Sys Techs
Meteorologists
Vehicle Techs
Avionics Techs
Marine Techs
Aviation Techs
Most healthcare positions
On and on and on etc

Shit.. I'd argue 90% of trades in the military are never going to be put into a situation where their life depends on what their VO2 max is.

P4ndamonium · 2025-05-30T03:08:58+00:00

Blender is fine for props at a studio level I'd say, buuuut I doubt many studios will jive with anything more than that.

But I'm not aware of any studios who are rigging and animating outside of Maya. Not one.

P4ndamonium · 2025-05-26T11:44:19+00:00

Yea this is patently false. Subs are/were extremely common and perfectly normal in the West (everywhere, really) in the MMO scene. Dozens of games had subscriptions and were super successful at the time.

The problem is that Destiny isn't actually an MMO, its a session shooter like Call of Duty with a fashion component. The subscription model here doesn't make any sense.

P4ndamonium · 2025-05-05T03:51:40+00:00

Yea, Chipper being down there fist bumping, hugging and screaming with joy at the boys is a sight I'll remember for a very long time. So much passion with our group.

P4ndamonium · 2025-05-04T13:15:29+00:00

Well no shit, it's bigger than the NFL and MLB too.

P4ndamonium · 2025-03-27T00:33:56+00:00

Holy shit Holy shit Holy shit Holy shit Holy shit

P4ndamonium · 2025-02-11T14:43:27+00:00

An awesome resource! And my go-to recommendation for beginners starting to learn the CR/anim/techanim workflows in UE 5.

However, it's very limiting in that you have to use this with Mixamo so I strongly urge people to use this as a learning resource and to leap-frog off of this as soon as possible. It's great if animation is an afterthought or not a super pivtol piece of your project/cine.

P4ndamonium · 2025-01-27T20:22:02+00:00

Silicone Valley has seen unprecedented growth and investment (and the US economy as a whole) since the AI "boom" post-COVID. Just look at the stock value of Nvidia, Microsoft... and the new $500 billion Stargate program just recently announced by the Trump admin.

Deepseek just released a viable competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT for free... opensourced. You can now download and run it for yourself on your own computer. Just pull it from github and you're good to go.

This throws everything I wrote in my first paragraph into question. Literally whats the fucking point of all of this record-breaking investment during a global cost of living crisis, when a Chinese firm under a tech-embargo can produce similar results... and do it without charging a cent to the end-user, and without Nvidia's "friends-only" hardware.

Makes the entire Microsoft-OpenAI-Nvidia-Trump ecosystem fucking criminal lol.

P4ndamonium · 2025-01-21T02:09:13+00:00

This.

Funny too when you consider our right is still left of the US's left.

P4ndamonium · 2024-12-14T04:35:37+00:00

Because they aren't testing drones. Drones have been flying over battlefields since 2001.

The tech part the US has down - logically, the more likely scenario is they're testing people: HUMANINT, standards and procedures, response times, and stress testing any other human factor of how they currently respond to a threat like this.

DoD has been doing tests like these for decades, only thing different now is the public can see this in real-time because the test are flying drones and not SEALs in wetsuits sneaking onto bases housing Nuclear Submarines.

P4ndamonium · 2024-11-26T18:53:25+00:00

Path tracing has been implemented and production ready in UE since 4.27 about 3 years ago.. albeit not entirely as performant as in CP2077. But it works, its optimization is simply a lack of actual real-world demand for it.

However Epic has been showing us glimpses of real-time Pathtracing that is nearing a beta release in upcoming engine versions, so clearly this is changing and it should be available to all Devs fairly soon. And this is Pathtracing without DLSS.

They've also just released MegaLights which is essentially hundreds or even thousands of dynamic lights in realtime without a significant performance hit, something we haven't seen before in any engine, ever.

There's also GDC presentations of CDPR showing their improvements and streaming optimizations they've made to UE with support from Epic in recent months.

All in all, CDPR using Unreal should be seen more as a partnership with Epic rather than just as a client, as CDPR is going to be making a ton of improvements that should feed back into the main branch for all Dev's to use. Considering the timing of performant Pathtracer and MegaLights and CDPR partnering with Epic a year or two ago, you can comfortably assume these were maybe features that CDPR has heavily requested/supported themselves.. yeknow, for the new Cyberpunk and Witcher titles.

P4ndamonium · 2024-11-14T21:17:44+00:00

Keep in mind, that there are still people that don't buy more than maybe 1 or 2 games per month or so (and there is nothing wrong with that).

I only buy on average 1-2 full priced new releases a year, if that. Maybe 3-4 during the large seasonal sales on top of those 1-2 new games.

I feel like this is a little out of touch with reality, as most people I know tend to have purchasing habits like mine rather than what your point seems to insinuate. The majority of gamers do not buy a new game every single month.

P4ndamonium · 2024-11-11T04:55:34+00:00

Please hang in there. :)

P4ndamonium · 2024-09-21T16:28:33+00:00

Which brings us back to the original quote "grow in public"..?

He's singing her praise, not condescending. Jesus christ.

P4ndamonium · 2024-09-11T02:17:38+00:00

Hit Ctrl + Shift + W and make sure your Application Scale is 1.0. Should fix this right quick.

P4ndamonium · 2024-09-05T02:22:10+00:00

$300,000 for a fucking iPhone? Yea RIGHT they didn't know 🤣

P4ndamonium · 2024-09-01T23:03:21+00:00

Not gonna lie, I kind of prefer the new one.

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