James Edwards

@BenPielstick @om_patel5 Probably doable right now. The same way we control zremesher and other remeshers with poly groups could be inpainted to an image as color/detail zones before the mesh is created. Likewise after a mesh is created, being able to paint detail zones right on the mesh and regenerating

@om_patel5 I wish we would just teach AI to use proper modeling techniques instead of this.

this guy built an application that generates 3D models from images AND its open source, runs locally and supports any model

@ZandyXR Yeah I last used medium while working on The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners. After that project I ended up at another studio so no more VR. Still have my old occulus unit but haven’t used it since then. Seems the tech and tools are still evolving, which is great!

@JamesEdwards sweet!! It’s changed quite a bit. Were you doing work in Medium for sculpting? Have you tried shapelab or modeler? Love what youre doing in Nomad!

Here’s a vid of some experiments I did in Apple Vision Pro to see how well models, and converted 2d to 3d spatial videos would look in apple’s ecosystem. We all know how difficult it is sometimes to have the models show like they do in our native art program. Took a bit of work but they are good to go! Vid features VRart models, my attempts at spline animations and videos I converted to spatial. I am really into the spatial videos. Amazing how it bleeds into and interacts with the Apple 360 environment esp with some of my trippy vids. Still working out the kinks in a lot of things but we’re making progress!!! 🙌. Enjoy! #avp #apple #vrartist #spatialvideos #3dartist #vrartist #spatialcomputing #openbrushapp #adobemodeler #spline

@KatDoes3D As a character artist, %100 respect prop artists and their work. It’s all pixels in the end.

Being a prop artist kinda curses you to oblivion because no one really considers prop art to be "interesting" besides other prop artists. 😅

@ZandyXR Very cool!

✌️☮️🙌 Awesome VR Art

@ZandyXR Thanks! Almost ready to start sculpting all that line work!🥳

@JamesEdwards Beautiful work😍

Nomad Sculpt has become my favorite tool for concepting. Currently fleshing this one out.

Playing around with the metahuman mesh in Nomad sculpt. WIP

@drawsgood Ship it. 👍

OK, I have to admit the 3d rotation of still images in Photoshop Beta intrigued me, and I happened to have this chicken warrior handy. The results were.. unexpected (This was supposed to be a full grown chicken man)...

@SamSantala On the same page. On the one hand it sucks to see the sorry state of the industry, on the other I think this is the catalyst that will drive renewal. I’d rather be proactive and do something about it than give up, complain about it or sit on the sidelines hoping things improve.

Posted on LinkedIn last night, woke up to several hundred notifications, friends requests, etc. Seems I struck a nerve in the industry by saying I wanted to create my own projects and not be at the mercy of execs. It's going to have to be smaller studios and smaller projects.

@JamesFi47362177 @PsychoFr0ggy @kiwitalkz I stated a fact literally observed by working in the industry and only one piece of a bigger puzzle. I have no other emotional attachment to this discussion, nor do I care. The only “nerd chatter”here seems to be coming from your stank hole.

@PsychoFr0ggy @JamesEdwards @kiwitalkz "Games destroying AAA" is just what you losers call internet discussions where you say "I like this and not that". That has been happening for 20 years with no "imposion" because your nerd chatter has no power.

I know so many devs that have left the industry completely because of shit like this, you aren't even safe after launching a successful game anymore. What these stupid execs don't realise is when you lay people off, a huge knowledge base walks out the door with them and a lot of the time the people remaining have to essentially start from scratch because they aren't equipped to deal with the enormity of AAA game development out of lack of experience. You are witnessing the implosion of the industry in real time. The game industry is going to belong to China, South Korea and Japan over the next decade.

@insaneUEFN Thanks for sharing your process! As a 3d guy I still like to do a lot of my own character design and construction, but I love the idea of automating some of the drudge work and this is a great template!

In this experiment I wanted to try something with facial expressions and have it work with native Unreal Engine tools. I did find that generating the head with an open mouth helped to get some extra details. Creating those blend shapes was still not easy and this result is far from perfect. Ideally i want 58 generated expression references and have AI figure that out haha. btw first time baking the high poly details onto the low poly generated character. That worked surprisingly well! Endresult has 34k triangles! Built this character in 4 separate parts in Blender and generated each part in Hunyuan 3D Studio. The original references came from Nano Banana 2 and Grok. Trellis 2 in ComfyUI for the texturing. The animation was done with Control Rig in UEFN / Unreal Engine. With all the experiments so far, file and version management start to become a challenge. Getting files from different platforms with each platform having their own filename logic. I’ll have to find something to keep it more organized. Any suggestions?

@JamesFi47362177 @kiwitalkz It wasn’t normal when companies made games with small teams and profited enough to fund the next project and even do profit sharing. That goes away when you get purchased by a multinational. From there it becomes a boom/bust hire and fire cycle and profits only for shareholders.

@kiwitalkz Isnt this normal? You hire when you have work abd lay off when you dont leaving only a skeleton crew. Are you saying China and Japan dont? I highly doubt that.

@JShodanVR As a game dev who dreamed of someday doing my job in a vr environment the tech/interface isn’tmuch better than when it was first introduced. It’s all kindof underwhelming considering the 30 yr time gap between then and now.

@JShodanVR Honestly I pictured something closer to the cyberpunk literature of the time, not what we have now. I don’t think any of this tech really takes off until we have neural interfaces that can provide sensory input beyond just vision and audio.

I don’t understand. This stuff is real, it exists, you can actually buy it, and yet the VR market is almost dead. What happened to the kids in the 90s who dreamed about this possibility? Why do modern kids now go crazy for games where you don’t really do anything, where at most you just swipe up and down, or spend their time screaming in stupid games that require no concentration, like amoebas with no curiosity? This stuff finally f***ing exists, and yet the videogame market pretends it’s invisible. F***! F***! F***! In 1998, when we were 13 playing Resident Evil 2 on the PlayStation with my friends, we would have killed to be able to play something like this. Credits: @VirtuixOmni here’s their YT channel: youtube.com/watch?v=Evyjom…

@JShodanVR I’ve played VR games and created them using VR apps and while the experience is unique it isn’t comfortable enough to do for long stints the way I can with a clunky old workstation and graphics tablet.

@exolorian Yes, the community is far larger than that of any commercial software - great support network for those reasons and more. It has more forward momentum at this point than any commercial software as well. I’ve seen “pro” tools thrive or die based on who owns them.

@JamesEdwards I would add the community side of it. Seems to be stronger compared to others. In terms of tutorials, add-ons, etc…

What 3D software would you currently recommend for beginners?

@WillFaucherVFX What’s that saying? “Only a bad artist blames their tools”? 🤔 Using unreal engine, or any other tool is a choice made by the people in charge of the production. Unreal engine is a constantly evolving toolset for game dev that has only recently become useful in film production.

I've seen this floating around lately and it's... such a weird take? Because at least in my experience, UE is not used for final-pixel in film. Sure it's used in volumes for virtual production, but those are usually replaced in post anyway. Not to mention UE is not replacing offline-rendering in VFX pipelines. CGI is "worse in movies now" for so many other reasons that are too nuanced for a tweet, executives, a lack of planning ahead or taking way too many shortcuts. CGI these days is *good*, so good in fact we often just don't see it. There always was bad CGI, there always will be some bad CGI. Survivorship bias is a thing here.

@madebyabra Could be worse I guess. At least it’s not 3dsmax.

🚨BREAKING🚨 Zohran Mamdani will FORCE all New Yorkers to learn Blender. What are your thoughts on this?