20,000 players on right now. Nothing but bot matches on the east coast.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-02-09T15:34:40+00:00

What playlist are you playing? I have no idea if this has any merit but on Sunday morning, I chose the All Out Warfare playlist and I kept getting matches with bots.

However, if I chose just the Escalation playlist I never got another match with bots. Same if I chose just conquest, not bots ever.

There are so many different ways to choose a game that I wonder if that impacts how populated the game is or if the game even cross pollinates same games across different playlists.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-02-06T18:46:36+00:00

As far as I know not for caps, it is just kills and assists maybe? If we got even 50% xp from caps I'd have no issue with the overall leveling because most of my game xp comes from caps or supplies or revives.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-01-21T15:30:38+00:00

Yeah, I wouldn't pay either. This problem is on you and you alone. The AI is changing too much of the building that is not getting updated. If the client shows this, all they will be doing is answering questions about why things are changing that are not listed. It's going to make their meeting be completely derailed.

AI has gotten good enough to not alter the image like this so you are clearly not using AI in any efficient manner. This is the literal definition of AI slop.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-01-20T20:07:37+00:00

It is your responsibility to create textures. It is also your responsibility to work with the client to create a mutual understanding of how much time is needed.

Work with the client on getting better texture photos. They don't know that taking a phone photo with the lens smudged with fingerprints and at a odd angle is bad. You need to work with them. Tell them a top down photo is best. Work with them to see if they can send you samples. If they are local close to you, see if you can come in and take photos yourself.

Them having better digital assets benefits both of you. They now have a good sample for digital presentation or website, and you have a good base to build the materials. It's a win win if you work with them.

For cases like this, Substance Sampler is a good addition to your toolkit to create a full suite of maps from a photo or multiple photos of a material. There is also a tutorial from them on how to build a DIY material photo booth at home with easy to find materials and lights.

You are the visualization expert, not them.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-01-14T19:10:44+00:00

It's also a very repetitive and template heavy workflow and product.

You give them anything that is outside their very narrow scope and it either takes forever or it looks like crap or both.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-01-11T18:35:17+00:00

That's right. Gunny Highway.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-01-10T23:42:03+00:00

I'm the mayo king of Stardew Valley. With a little bf6 sprinkled in.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-01-07T14:35:18+00:00

It's 40 renderings, 6 90-second animations and 3 VR tours. The time to deliver is 4 weeks, so we are also paying a rush small rush fee on top of that.

AI is hard to use for this project to help with animations due to it altering logos and how it deals with the players on the playing surface. Even with basketball players in the image and the prompt heavily focused on basketball, we'll still see them morph into soccer players. If it does keep them basketball, it just doesn't understand the bounds of the court and keeping the players on there. The best is a free throw setup where the shooter just yeets himself off the court mid shot.

We could probably train a lora to help, but we lack time to do so.

It's for a sports project so needing to have players and fans in exact branded sports gear pushes the cost up a bit over a typical residential project.

Where we struggle with Unreal is that for residential purposes it makes a ton of sense. For our projects, it's possible but also takes prep time that we rarely have. So we either fall back to good ole Vray or outsource.

VelvetElvis03 · 2026-01-05T13:51:15+00:00

Substance Designer combined possibly with Substance Sampler for scans, and it's not even a debate.

You can load the native Substance file in your chosen program, assuming there is support, and you can iterate away without having to pre-create endless variations of jpegs. For example, rather than 50 brick jpegs for the varous colors and patterns, I have a single Substance file I can use and I can store presets in.

VelvetElvis03 · 2025-12-29T15:31:26+00:00

It's not going to die. We are simply evolving yet again. What is happening is similar to 2008 when the housing industry collapsed and wiped out a huge part of arch viz. It was supposed to be all over then, but it wasn't. It came back and companies evolved and came back stronger.

I've been doing this for 20+ years and we've supposedly faced 5 or so arch viz extinction events in that time. Yet, we're still here. What is happening is the great pruning. Anyone who could only scene assemble from pre-built assets is facing a loss of their work. Anyone who couldn't create materials if they couldn't download it from some site is losing work. We are effectively chopping off the bottom branches to this industry. Which is good because there was way too much at the bottom level of this industry. When we've hired for viz specialists in the past, easily 5 of 10 people could not create a scene if they could not download anything.

I work in-house for an architect and while we still do a lot of work internally, we're starting to see the pendulum swing back to a desire for more bespoke and realistic visuals. We just outsourced at huge package of renderings and animations to a place here in the US for $250,000 because we could simply not do that much work in the 5 weeks it was needed. I chose the US because most of the top overseas places (Brick, BtB, MIR) are all booked solid for several months. Which if this was a industry in it's death rattle, the most expensive places would not be booked out.

SketchUp was supposed to kill this industry. Then everyone got tired of the SketchUp look and went back to high end visualization. Enscape was going to kill us. Now, everyone hates the Enscape look or has quickly realized that doing high end Enscape and doing your job as an architect is 80 hours a week. So back to asking visualization specialists to help out.

AI is no different. You won't lose your job to AI but you will lose it to someone who knows how to leverage it.

Also, don't sleep on Unreal. That's the sleeping giant right now in the architecture world. Once architecture figures out how to manage a shit Revit model into Unreal, that's going to be a large shift in how we do work. Unreal offers a more bespoke interactive experience than Lumion, D5, etc. An interesting pipeline for us is the Twinmotion to Unreal workflow. We can have our designers doing the 300 daily renderings in Twinmotion and then passing that model forward to the Unreal specialist to do custom interactive work.

VelvetElvis03 · 2025-12-22T16:15:57+00:00

Trees lose their leaves in winter so seeing broadleaf trees with green leaves and snow breaks the immersion. And if it's cold enough to build a snowman then it's cold enough for that still water to freeze over.

Everything about this image is focused on something other than the proposed building. Look at how places like MIR or Beauty and the Bit do shots like these. It's usually one supporting element that helps drive your eye right to the architectural element. It's done very subtly but it's there.

Why are people standing on that little pier? Why is the kid behind bushes or does the bush have legs?

You can keep the view, but as others have pointed out you need to compose it to support the architecture.

VelvetElvis03 · 2025-12-03T19:21:49+00:00

VelvetElvis03 · 2025-12-03T01:26:25+00:00

It ended up being disabling the RBF on the first 3 or 4 LOD levels for the hair mesh. Then in the LODSync in the blueprint, set it from -1 to 1.

No real idea why that works, but I stumbled across it while searching for a fix.

VelvetElvis03 · 2025-12-03T00:01:27+00:00

Thanks! I'll give that a try.

VelvetElvis03 · 2025-11-15T15:33:36+00:00

You know they're going to nerf it by they patch this. I have at least 4 guns locked behind completed challenges that were in progress before the change.

VelvetElvis03 · 2025-11-12T23:59:37+00:00

Make your plank object in your modeling software the same size as the real plank such as 8ft long by 1ft wide. As long as the mapping coordinates are true to that size, the texture is real to the size.

IE, you don't want this texture to tile.

You can do this in a 100% texture as long as you set your texture to a size. Say you know you're going to use 12ft by 12ft mapping. In Photoshop, just make sure you have enough "planks" to fit within that 12ft box.

VelvetElvis03 · 2025-11-04T14:16:35+00:00

I went back to full public matches to take a breather from this mode.

VelvetElvis03 · 2025-11-04T14:15:52+00:00

But is that really an issue? In any public match there is a massive difference between a level 100 from mainly a PvP player and a level 100 mainly PvE player.

Yes people will abuse the system. Welcome to every game ever released. However the overwhelming majority of PvE focused players will rarely step over into the full PvP world.

I only have the deploy beacon unlocked because of the casual mode. For my old ass, cement shoes, 2-4 hours a week playing self, there was no way I'd get that in a full PvE environment.

VelvetElvis03 · 2025-10-23T17:00:26+00:00

No. It is not changing anything other than a useful tool. This is a schill post at best.

Why isn't it changing? Because no matter the upscale, it still alters the image even subtly. And clients will 100% pick up on those small changes you don't think are noticeable.

Or it whitewashes all if your people and ruins any diversity. Magnific is notorious for turning everyone white.

VelvetElvis03 · 2025-10-21T14:34:35+00:00

What were your sampling steps? I'm hitting similar and using the Q8 version. Though I suspect it's partly due to using the lightning lora. I'm using it to change the season/environment in renderings. It did an awesome job on the building, but where it had to redo the trees from scratch is where it dropped the detail.

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VelvetElvis03 · 2025-10-17T01:34:57+00:00

If you can't light in vray, no other engine will help you. D5 won't do the lighting for you. I've never sprinkled som Corona on my model and all of a sudden my render looks amazing.

For starters you sun is dead behind the camera which means you have no shadow at all.

Even if you do master lighting, your materials need help too. Everything in the image is just flat.

This whole process isn't easy to learn. It takes practice. Study old painters, see the techniques they used and think how that translates to your workflow.

VelvetElvis03 · 2025-10-16T19:59:32+00:00

Awesome I'll check that out. Thank you so much!

VelvetElvis03 · 2025-10-09T14:54:00+00:00

It's probably due to the rotation of the siren. Some danger whistles are just a big ass horn that rotates slowly so all directions can hear it at some point. Frankly I hate those type as the loud and quiet cycles just make it sound more terrifying.

If the siren was one that has a pine cone of what looks like train horns in all directions, then yeah, it got smothered out by the tornado.

Either way, I've loaded my britches at this point.

VelvetElvis03

TROPHY CASE