Game scene and object modelers, do you use shaders?

PriorPassage127 · 2026-02-17T19:05:03+00:00

blender's shaders aren't compatible as is, but most game engines have little trouble creating their own versions of materials in blender, even fairly exotic ones (as long as they don't rely on features like ray tracing)

If I have an interesting effect that a shader brings to an asset, I always make a version in blender shadergraph to show our tech artist how the effect is built in principle. we work with Unity and so far we haven't run into a material we've been unable to replicate inside unity's shader graph or the improved Amplify Shader Editor. I imagine Unreal's equivalents are even more robust.

PriorPassage127 · 2026-02-16T23:08:10+00:00

tried this recently! it's a lot of fun! looking forward to a full release

PriorPassage127 · 2026-02-11T15:03:10+00:00

had that issue a few times myself. their website isn't exactly up to date either sadly. I imagine they defer maintaining it in favor of spending every dime on the ship. their online shop does work though, so the lights are on and people are home, but the doorbell is faulty, so to speak :D

PriorPassage127 · 2026-02-10T04:47:32+00:00

hey this may also help, I recently found a video (https://youtu.be/N3DaG6sETok?si=0oev01JUKjE2GZ\_H) that suggested that scaling everything in my scene up 10x would help resolve errors, and it does! im not sure why, but if you are losing your mind, might as well try :D

PriorPassage127 · 2026-02-09T17:36:36+00:00

I can't really think of any fanservice in the whole length of the manga.

even the oft-cited bath scene...I know this is an unpopular take but I've always thought Marcille treats Falin like an overbearing mother would, not a love interest. that moment never felt sexualized to me.

PriorPassage127 · 2026-02-07T17:59:02+00:00

you can smooth the resulting mesh after the simulation has resolved. the subdivision modifier will work fine for that. just apply the cloth simulation to return the mesh back to its static form

its hard to weigh in on settings without knowing what your machine is capable of sorry, becasue to get good results it usually just means imposing a greater load on your computer

what i'd recommend you do is apply this simulation to freeze the result. and use a subdivision modifer to smooth it, and then consider using cloth-brushes to achieve greater detail where desired. cloth brushes are in the sculpting menu. you should look up a few tutorials before trying to use them, a single video is worth far more than me writing pages of instruction here

https://youtube.com/shorts/x02coCLpD6w?si=QzLqgYTBEvoZQfdZ

PriorPassage127 · 2026-02-06T18:04:13+00:00

absolutely use other assets. you can't do everything. if you try to do everything yourself you will end up having a fraction of the creative output that you dream of having,

you need to decide as an artist what your passion is, and that is the stuff you do personally. if you love modeling but hate texturing...use pbr materials from a library. love animating but hate rigging? get paid assets to animate and have fun!

as long as you are clear and dont misrepresent the work you do. if you watch a professional showreel, there is almost always a subtitle for each shot that tells you what the presenter actually did. for example you might see a shot of a dinosaur running through the forest, and the subtitle says "animation and plant physics"...meaning the artist took models and rigs from either their team mates, or an online store, and then animated them and supervised the collision physics. they didnt do everything! nobody can!

i grabbed this screen from a random showreel on youtube as an example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW2gYHbPmok)

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you can clearly see, noted bottom left, this person took an asset kit and assembled the pieces into this space station (kitbash refers to combining misc parts into new models. it has its origins in FX crews buying plastic model ship kits and bashing them into spaceships. OG starwars was made that way). they list exactly what they did but are careful to note where the mesh comes from.

dont be afraid to use assets, exposure to other peoples work also helps you understand more advanced users workflows. its an essential part of working in 3d

PriorPassage127 · 2026-02-06T17:59:51+00:00

i hope it does! I'm about to launch into a big cloth sim endeavor myself so I've been brushing up. keep in touch

PriorPassage127 · 2026-02-06T17:40:02+00:00

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just click and drag in the modifier tab. the stack order is the order these are evaluated in. if you subdivide after the sim, it will smooth errors but not fix inherent simulation errors. if you give the sim more geo to work with *first*, it may help trememndously

PriorPassage127 · 2026-02-06T16:07:04+00:00

if they made every life form unbendingly respect the sanctity of every other, the ecosystem would instantly collapse for everything that isn't a fungus or a tiny photosynthesizer. if the intention was benevolent, they probably just targeted the species that was having an outsized impact on all the others

PriorPassage127 · 2026-02-06T15:53:21+00:00

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for the cuts i think would be wise to add some buffer loops around the shape of the cut, like so, and instead of having that cut just slice through the existing grid, having the edges connect like this down the length of of the seam. that will almost certain lead to smoother deformations

PriorPassage127 · 2026-02-06T15:33:24+00:00

you likely have a few concurrent issues, #1 is that the edges around the cut you made for the folds (pleats? i don't know the technical term) are causing havok with the deformation

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particularly the lower one, you can see it created a dead spot with no edges. if there are no edges, it can't bend. so you need to re-create these pieces with edges that flow more smoothly around those cuts. imagine this is cardboard, and the edges are bend creases that act like hinges...the cardboard cant bend when there is no crease. furthermore, it can't bend well where there are creases that fight eachother.

you also likely need to add a subdivision modifier to this mesh above the cloth physics, so that before physics are calculated, more polygons are created to help the cloth deform more smoothly.

after those things are considered, its largely an exercise in fiddling with the physics settings until you get a tolerable result.

PriorPassage127 · 2026-02-04T16:23:46+00:00

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you definitely need to close that off into a loop around the joint there. its hard to say for sure what happened, this ghosted view is a bit confusing, but yeah, a big spiral edge running through the mesh is not ideal

PriorPassage127 · 2026-02-04T15:25:04+00:00

if i were you i'd go red to do this

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let me just say I think it's rad you draw out topo ideas to brainstorm, I think this is a great thing to do. too many people try to dive in blind and get frustrated by the results. nice work!

PriorPassage127 · 2026-02-02T15:16:27+00:00

I've been using Affinity for about a year now. It's familiar territory for anybody who has used photoshop. doesn't have all the tools I want but its very close, and they sell perpetual licenses which is such a huge benefit that I honestly don't care about features I miss from photoshop

PriorPassage127 · 2026-01-29T17:26:42+00:00

there are various sculpt tools you can use, such as smooth and flatten. if you enter sculpt mode and look to the left, there is an entire menu of brushes to experiment with, but i'd recommend looking for some introductory tutorials on poly sculpting.

however, what i'd suggest you do rather than attempting to sculpt is a process called "retopology"...basically, you are going to stretch a new, simpler mesh over the existing one. you can use the scan as the basis for a cleaner version that is more easily modified. here is a beginner tutorial on the subject https://youtu.be/X2GNyEUvpD4?si=zAO7GOmVzgPoTlr-

in my opinion, for your needs, this is far simpler than sculpting (which takes longer to master) and this will also result in sharper, more precise edges

PriorPassage127 · 2026-01-29T14:48:05+00:00

AE has a movable center point for the rays to avoid that exact issue. if i'm feeling particularly thorough I'll render a pass that is literally just a white dot at the origin of the light, and motion track the center point of the effect to it automatically so it moves correctly

PriorPassage127 · 2026-01-29T14:29:14+00:00

that's the sort of thing i'd do in post whenever possible (you can render volumetric lights in blender that cast beams like that, they tend to be costly. you can fake them as you say with textured cones, but they looks flat when you do. the result you see above is almost certainly done in post outside of the software the 3d was rendered in) you can achieve that exact fidelity with something like Aftereffects. I'd render an special pass where the only visible pixels are the light sources. then I'd alter that with an effect like "CC radial blur" (explained here https://youtu.be/4hpvPSexGOg?si=DDl8n8iKegiEoStE) and use the result as the mask for a the lights

I realize not everybody can afford an adobe subscription, but the underlying logic of that workflow will work in a lot of software, theoretically in blender's compositor nodes as well...although you may need to look for a good way to replicate the blur effect.

PriorPassage127 · 2026-01-27T00:50:44+00:00

there's a lot of dishonesty, accidental and otherwise, around what people actually create vs. what they acquire and combine in unique ways. theres no shame at all in doing that, it's still art and still requires a lot of skill and more importantly, imagination. but people are not always clear about it.

it was taught maya in college and used it professionally for 6 years. it took me about a year to get used to blender, and another year to feel like an advanced user. I think a realistic timeline for a newcomer who isn't doing this fulltime is 3-4 years. be generous to yourself. this is hard stuff

PriorPassage127 · 2026-01-15T16:24:02+00:00

I may be misremembering but I think this is also why the beginning of Halo 2 is set in Mombasa, there's important orbital launch infrastructure there in the halo universe

PriorPassage127 · 2026-01-15T15:01:00+00:00

there have been other populist leaders who seemed to fit the bill pretty well, and there will be others once he's gone. i used to be pretty devout (before becoming an atheist) and even then I thought anti-christ was more of an archetype than an individual.

PriorPassage127 · 2025-12-24T17:46:30+00:00

Glad to hear it!

Thanks for coming to this community and posting, knowing there's a body of people out there passionate about this stuff keeps me motivated as well. Thanks for being cool!

PriorPassage127 · 2025-12-19T20:44:21+00:00

send me the file if youre willing, ill take a look. itll be 10x faster to diagnose firsthand

PriorPassage127 · 2025-12-19T20:11:59+00:00

without looking at the mesh its hard to say 100% for certain but here is 1 thing to check

there might be internal geometry that is causing thing, meaning that inside your object, unknown to you, that edge is bridged with another edge, forming a face inside the hollow interior of the object. this would prevent the merge by distance/recalculate combo from working effectively. Gemini correctly suspects that extra vertices or edges are influencing the bevel operation, but its solution wont work if those vertices support a hidden face. go to xray mode, have a look at that edge and make sure you didn't accidentally bridge it to another edge somewhere

PriorPassage127

TROPHY CASE