Sasquatch Doodles

Applying for jobs is a lot of whiplash, where one studio's "good" is another's "eww gross". I've worked on a pretty big range over the years, and find that people appreciate if you mess about in their style a bit,

ComfyUI for Developers Who are Good at Stuff

While I pine for the days of spending weeks in zbrush sculpting and painting every last detail for the next great AAA game, my suspicion is that those days are gone... or at least they're gone for anyone living in the US in the foreseeable future. So what

Making my "Cumulus" Cloud System Production-Ready

The world is absolutely SATURATED right now with flashy, but ultimately tech-debt-riddled, proofs of concept. Good workflows do more. They string all the way through the pipeline cleanly. They are performant. Directable. They work with existing systems without calling themselves out for special attention. That's the

Painterly Cloud Tool: Putting it all together

In this episode, I combine the shape generator, path tracer, and card generator modules into a single workflow. I'm happy with the results! Is performant, and feels nice n' painterly without losing form or physicality. Lots of "intersection of tech and art" tidbits in this

Holy Crap Custom Path Trace Rendering in UE5!

In this episode, I do a little victory lap as I show off my "Cumulus" cloud lighting system. This is a fully custom path renderer in UE5, applied to a custom true subsurface path shader, and then applied directly to verts as HDR lighting information. Not gonna lie,

Wrangling Crazy Uncle Claude with UE5 MCP Toolsets

I integrated UE5.8’s experimental MCP Toolset into my project this weekend; wanted to share thoughts and results here for anyone who is interested. AI is like... Mocap? To understand what this is for, I think it’s important to back up and understand where we are at in

Blueprint Components, Libraries, and You.

In this short video, I explore Blueprint Component and Blueprint Libraries as a way to make this cloud tool more directable, scalable, and easier for a less technical artist to use.

Style Study: Chris Sanders

Being away from home means a return to traditional art practice. I've taken this time to dive into Chris Sanders' style from Lilo And Stitch. Always been a big fan of his illustrations. Couple takeaways so far: - Lots of Bill Waterson, Henson and Frazetta influence. - Thick limbs

See you in October

Out of town until the end of the month, so only have an iPad to sketch around on. Using the time away from tech art to sketch out a vague comic idea I have floating in my head. Just me slapping paint around in Procreate. Good change of pace.

Clouds Ep 5: Custom physical(ish) Stylized Shaders

In this episode, we're learning how, starting from an Unlit shader, to build up custom object lighting from scratch. This is a hugely useful skill, that will enable you not only to break from Unreal's standard look, but also get back big gains in performance!

Clouds: Pt. 4

Ayyy getting to the fun part! In this one we're diving into how to generate the cloud cards, and various artsy and techy tricks on how to make them feel painterly.

Clouds: Pt 3

In this step, we use some simple traditional painting techniques to truly zero in on concept art, and execute on its look in-game. This, more than anything, is the key to "it looks like concept art" type delight. So many technical artists avoid traditional media and it

Clouds: Pt 2

Over my career, I've observed how some of the most skilled artists often can't truly break down what their style actually is. They just do their thing, and with some luck and a lot of hard work, a studio's style grows out of their

Procedural Cloud System: pt 1

Tackling the procedural cloud system for the Arcane scene, using Paths of Hate as a technical inspiration. Great excuse to dive into UE5's Procedural Content Generation system and see what it can do to push development velocity and production value at the same time.

News

TechArt Arcane style

Started this week on a deep dive into latest UE5.8 rendering and techart tools for large scale world gen. First up here is reference analysis, foundational rendering, and a dive into UE's new hybrid CSM/DFS system.