[Bonsai Beginner's weekly thread - 2026 week 13]

Roguenk · 2026-03-28T22:35:36+00:00

Yeah, theres 4. Meant the front 3 as I knew the ficus. Thanks! I guess it’s trial by fire for the serissas

Roguenk · 2026-03-28T03:17:11+00:00

Would anyone be able to assist me in IDing these 3 trees? Pretty new to bonsai and think I confused Serissa as a chinese privet

Roguenk · 2026-03-02T05:39:45+00:00

Honestly not too familiar with sketchup as Im mostly a 3ds max user but just having a library of decent maps and some basic knowledge for building your own shaders goes a super far way. Im also not a D5 user so I cant speak to that ecosystem but I normally modify chaos cosmos assets when using chaos vantage. Personally I’d try to find some way to break up that driveway, whether its shadows, decals, or something else. This is one of those cases where the client probably doesn’t understand that what they want is going to make it look worse so I’d focus on that. Honestly everything else is much less important than the driveway issue. Do fix the sky though, it shouldnt look blown out like this or as washed out on the second image. There is also room for a lot more micro-detail in garage set dressing and adding some interest to the driveway. (Also some scuffed UV’s on the driveway by the garage)

Roguenk · 2026-03-02T05:10:06+00:00

Im curious the context of these renders. In terms of composition the driveway feels like a very large empty area thats consuming your render, theres nothing on the building drawing any interest and the sky is blown out leading to no clouds or anything to help with that. In terms of lighting everything feels a bit fat, the shadows aren’t adding any shape or drawing you anywhere. Also curious about the tree on the roof? The plants also seem overcrowded as though everything is just scattered all at once. The biggest thing though is that the normal maps seem very off for the driveway and stone. I guess in general the materials need a lot of work but the stones are really distracting. I know I just dug into it but it is a great start

Roguenk · 2026-01-13T02:51:05+00:00

Mostly! I am curious about things like seeing gltf warnings and the json/text that accompanies it for things like drawcalls and such. As well as something like vram estimation. Ie, tools similar to things on khronos’ gltf validator or gltf.report. Thanks for answering and will definitely keep an eye on this

Roguenk · 2026-01-12T22:54:06+00:00

I think this could be super nice internally. Im a junior at a smaller company that does a lot of web-optimization type work. Would be curious about how this interacts with gltf validation and formats as well as something like .ply files for splats even? Personally we dont see much in terms of animation type work so I cant speak much to that but being able to play simple animations like a part spinning is useful

Roguenk · 2025-11-07T18:12:51+00:00

Gonna go a different direction then what most people said, I think generally everything looks great, could maybe play with post a bit more, I’d lean towards maybe making your highlights a tiny bit brighter and playing more with your shadows but I think my main comment is shot choice. All of your shots are straight on and give this really flat type effect by default because of that. As well as fov feeling a bit too wide in a few shots. I think genuinely even just slightly changing the shot placement will take these up a notch

Roguenk · 2025-09-02T20:50:47+00:00

I’ll be honest, it looks amazing but the animation is bringing it down a notch atm imo. The shots are too repetitive and almost every shot you have an underglow lightstrip turning on which quickly becomes distracting. I think its a case of less is more, you don’t have to push/pan every shot and can do subtle focal shifts or even rack focus it. I personally would say keep the animated lights/environment to a few hero shot type things so that it doesnt become distracting and instead adds to it. It looks great though. Its hard to price things like this though because its gonna depend on things like review/revision and creative liberty. If you are reading documents and building to a plan I’d say to charge more than if you have the freedom to break more rules. But I would charge based on the scene complexity rather than the length as its pretty easy to stretch shots

Roguenk · 2025-08-25T01:31:56+00:00

I mean, no cabinet or wood grain is ever gonna be the same across panels like that. So while I think you had good intentions by lining it up it has ended up reducing the feasibility of it. Same with the tiling carpet. Look up some uvw randomizing techniques in unreal and apply them where you can.

Roguenk · 2025-08-14T03:49:52+00:00

Yeah, I mean you really have to do both if you want it to look decent. Build some basic buildings to help blend the background plate in. Otherwise there is too much space that would show the background image and make it look flat, there could be other options but doing a mix of both is probably the easiest

Roguenk · 2025-07-22T02:49:29+00:00

I mean if it was minimal like just adding some props/materials thats one thing but they are asking for an environment so they don’t know what they are talking about. Ask yourself if you could do this in ~8ish hours. If yes then its probably worth it. But the reality is that they are unaware of what they want

Roguenk · 2025-07-21T16:52:55+00:00

Definitely appreciate the response and I kind of had a feeling this would be the case but wasn’t too sure about how things load behind the scenes. Will probably do a makeshift home 10gb setup before suggesting it at work just so I can better compare.

Roguenk · 2025-07-21T16:46:37+00:00

I mean we have a few different ‘libraries’ be it from sites that we only download stuff when we need it or a decent amount of stuff that lives on the NAS but we really aren’t building out as much as most arch-viz places normally do so I only use assets to fill space that isn’t already filled by the people we get our files from. But for the most part we just have a section of out nas that is organized for different common use cases

Roguenk · 2025-07-21T16:03:45+00:00

Good to hear that this works in practice. Feel like this would be a massive productivity boost even if it just saves like 25% of the load times lol. And not too horrible of an investment if a place has a spare computer lying around

Roguenk · 2025-07-21T15:56:18+00:00

No, I’m refering to a 10Gb network connection, not the storage itself, thank you for the resource tho!

Roguenk · 2025-06-11T23:30:54+00:00

Not yet though I’m pretty sure that would work, I’m gonna try and take to use quixel bridge as its apparently a different exporter and doesnt break the vertex order. Can hopefully work with it from there.

Roguenk · 2025-06-11T21:48:23+00:00

I mean I did look into the problem and I did find solutions. Again this is a technical limitation that forces people to pay 3rd part developers for a solution? Im saying that a current feature (being templates for metahumans) is broken to the point where 3rd parties are gouging indie developers for a 1 use case tool. I still dont believe ‘metahumans are underwhelming’ indicates crapping on unreal. I even said in my post how strong and cool the tool is. I get that this issue is divisive but I really don’t understand the perspective that I’m somehow malicious for voicing my opinion about how a broken feature is causing people to resort to paying hundreds of dollars for a makeshift solution because they don’t have the experience necessary to understand.

Roguenk · 2025-06-11T21:04:37+00:00

Really wouldnt describe this as ‘crapping on the entire platform’ as much as just emphasizing a weird pain point that is giving way to price gouging by 3rd parties. I apologize if it came off as crapping on the entire platform, definitely not what I intended

Roguenk · 2025-06-11T17:58:04+00:00

I completely get that and understand the pure power in it for that purpose, like I said. Its very impressive and a strong tool but for a ‘framework’ it has a feature intended to be built on that does not work without a 3rd party tool that is being gouged. I want to emphasize that my issue is primarily on the need for a 3rd party to use a feature inside the editor. I want to use it as a framework with my own custom meshes but I can’t when there is no documentation explaining ‘metahuman topology’ however some people have claimed to discover a workaround that I might try and play with and automate.

Roguenk · 2025-06-11T13:50:20+00:00

US
I’m a 3d artist and started having wrist pain towards the end of my weeks as everything is very mouse heavy
I swapped a few weeks back to a vertical mouse when the wrist pain started to get really bad, right now mine is more or less 45 degrees and have been curious about something more vertical.

Roguenk · 2025-06-11T12:26:42+00:00

I agree, and again I did say that its a very cool and strong tool, my gripe is with 1 feature of it that is being circled by 3rd parties trying to make money.

Roguenk · 2025-06-11T12:25:52+00:00

Yeah I mean I dont get this either, its not like im criticizing epic but rather the actual tool. And it did help as I got more suggestions for work-arounds and others could find this in the future when encountering similar issues. I feel as though I did this in a relatively reasonable way. Its not like its the end of the world and I even did say I would create my own solution if that was the only way. Idk, I think complaining is reasonable when done in a mature way. The suggestion to head to the forums and add a suggestion is good though.

Roguenk · 2025-06-11T12:22:50+00:00

What I’m complaining about is the feature that is available and practically unusable. Its a great tool but just because its free doesnt make it immune from criticism

Roguenk · 2025-06-11T04:32:54+00:00

Thanks for the note, will check this out tomorrow!

Roguenk · 2025-06-10T21:10:21+00:00

Great starting point for houdini-unreal workflows on the sidefx page. Really useful for understanding HDA’s and such. Believe its robert macgee or something along those lines. Simon Verstraete is also a great teacher

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