iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 30/09/2026

Bunny clothing shop NPC done I think. How's she look? Any name suggestions?

Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 29/09/2026

My solution, make a version of the body with the legs combined as if they were a dress, copy the weights from the body mesh, then adjust the weights between the legs on the simplified mesh (fewer verts, non-complex geo = easier!) then copy weights from that onto the final dress!

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 28/09/2026

Getting in the groove of making new clothing pieces but every time I make a dress/skirt having to manually paint the weights is KILLING me I have a great system for most things, just copy weights over from a base mesh, and transferring morphs, but UGH fixing weights

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Reposted by Dylan

Christian Sparks @hippowombat.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Hey there friends! Unfortunately, I was among those impacted by layoffs at Heart Machine last week. If you or someone you know is looking for an experienced Unreal Engine Technical Artist, I'm available for full time, part time, or contract opportunities.

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 24/09/2026

Next NPC is the clothing shop owner, doodling designs and thinking of something like this. She needs a name!

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 22/09/2026

Working on the outfit for the first NPC you meet, Professor Whiskers. He uses his magical staff as a fishing rod! (also slowly adding more equipment pieces like little hair tufts you can place etc!)

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 19/09/2026

While working on new clothing, I decided being able to choose colours from a limited palette only is kind of lame. So I added a colour picker, and a way to save colours so you can quickly use them again later. Still needs polish though!

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 08/09/2026

NPCs look great and whimsical. Castle Town looks fantastic and bustling. Loved the mist under links feet in Kokiri forest. Why is link so shiny though. And the dead stare when doing the item get showoff. Underwhelmed with Links design, looks uncanny. And so much looks plastic

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 05/09/2026

Can any Maya users explain why this happens? Sometimes when I extrude the original face gets duplicated so the object stays solid. Other times it moves the selected/extruded face up and leaves a "hole" where it was. Is there a setting for this? Or something?

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 04/09/2026

Meow. New cat ears, earrings, wizard hat, and some quick legging variations today. Slowly working my way towards the wizard cat's npcs outfit

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 01/09/2026

Added shoes as a new equipment type that properly changes your characters height. And some accessory tests that you can manually adjust the placement of! (also new hair, and clothing models on this character but it was just a cleanup pass as I nail down the workflow)

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 14/08/2026

Spent the working on the first boat and polishing it up. Incudes adding some details to make the boat feel a bit more fancy, a magical steering wheel the character actually turns, and new splash vfx. Ready to go sailing on the great sea!

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 13/08/2026

Is there a trick to getting a Niagara ribbon working when it's inside an actor bp? If I place the vfx in world, and move it around manually it works great. If I place the vfx in blueprint viewport and move it around it does NOT show up at all. Whyyyyyy??

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 12/08/2026

Added a magical steering wheel for the boats on stream today. Player used to just stand there unresponsive while driving, so this little bit of polish really levels up the feel!

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 08/08/2026

Game devs, what do you use for project/task management? Been using trello for a while, but gearing up to do a bunch of art stuff and having a single card per object feels overcomplicated (and not easy to see at a glance what is yet to be done). What are easy to use good options?

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 07/08/2026

Which house are you choosing?

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 21/07/2026

OooOoOoo misty ground particles spawning on only the water/shoreline/island meshes. Gotta figure out how to make the billboarding not look so dang gross but works good!

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 21/07/2026

Unreal Niagara/VFX Question. Thinking about adding a "ground mist" effect like particle spawns close to the ground and flowing along (for rainy/stormy/misty weather). If the ground is just meshes (not landscape) how could I do this?

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 19/07/2026

Anyone know of workarounds on how to make SetActorRotation on an obj sweep properly? My boat is moved via SetActorLocation/Rotation. SetLocation has a sweep option, so if I move forward (without rotating) I collide properly. But if I don't move and only rotate, I clip through!

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 17/07/2026

First house design done!

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 06/07/2026

Working on cleaning up the wallpaper/flooring items. Got proper previews in the house now!

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 04/07/2026

Made this little item details panel today

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 01/07/2026

Making some huge placeable building parts, I realized I can't take them to the customization shop to change their colours like normal furnitures, so I added paint that you can drop on any item!

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 26/06/2026

Unreal Devs: What do you use for version control? Where do you host? Need to migrate my SVN repo to a new host (old host is shutting down), or choose a new vc+host, and looking for suggestions/input. I solo dev. I like simple. I just throw all my files into the repo

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 26/06/2026

My server host that I've been using SVN with for all my version control (for the last decade!) apparently decided they are fully removing SVN support. I found out today when I couldn't connect to my repo! So annoyed, having to deal with this instead of getting actual work done :|

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 15/06/2026

Love it when I wake up and try to compile my unreal project that works working fine yesterday but today it fails with some random obscure error that was not there yesterday. I didn't change anything! Now I get to spend days probably trying to get things running again.... 😡

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 13/06/2026

Added a 3d item preview in your inventory, so you can see the item (and the customizations on it) before you place it. Will also use this as a details panel for item info!

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Reposted by Dylan

Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 11/06/2026

Working on furniture! Things are now interactable, and sit-able!

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 11/06/2026

Working on furniture! Things are now interactable, and sit-able!

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 11/06/2026

Is there a way to show this Transform widget gizmo in the asset editor window (left)? Only seems to show up in the editor viewport (right). Would be nice to be able to edit it without having to drag the asset into the scene and then copy the transform over...

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 08/06/2026

I store a list of all the ItemData's in my game (equipment, fish, placeables etc) in a map of (Enum_Item, Struct_ItemData). Enums max out at 255. So I need to change to something else. What are my options? Is this a good usecase for Gameplay Tags?

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 04/06/2026

You can now cycle through nearby items! Previously you were only able to interact with whatever was closest! Really happy with how the head (and eye) lookat works with this :)

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 01/06/2026

Unreal Engine DrawDebugBox ScreenSpace. Nodes in post below Turns out I was just overcomplicating things, scaling up the extents based on distance simply works. Rotate the box so it faces the camera, and tadaaa

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 01/06/2026

Been working on a new area: The Dockyard! This is where you can buy/customize your boat! Need to make the froggy NPC who will run the shop here

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 31/05/2026

In Unreal Engine, what's the easiest way to debug draw some simple lines in screen space? Want to make a debug mode that highlights specific actors and draws some screenspace boxes (and text) around them so I can easily locate them in-game when playing

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 22/05/2026

Been working on new furniture pieces slowly for the last month! Elegant Leafy set and Mossy Mushrooms set! What does everyone think? Any that stand out as super cool (or super lame?)

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 26/04/2026

Okay so PSO's are now properly precompiling on my main menu which makes the stuttering much less on map load, but this precompile is NOT being saved between launches. I thought was supposed to? Every time I relaunch the main menu takes a few mins to precompile everything again..?

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 26/04/2026

Struggling with PSOPrecaching today. Following the info here (tomlooman.com/unreal-engin...) my understanding was you just enable r.PSOPrecaching=1 and on first load things would be cached, then subsequent loads would use that. But this is not happening? Is there something more to do?

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 16/04/2026

How would you model the green mossy bits? Struggling really hard today translating this to 3d. Just sculpt it and deal with the fact that it needs a ton of tris?

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 15/04/2026

Working on a new furniture and ended up going down a rabbit hole for a week on making thin foliage look extra glowy when looking towards the sun. This is why progress on this game is taking forever 😂

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 12/04/2026

More glowy! By default the two sided SSS for foliage is not very bright (shown at the begining and end of gif) and like you can kind of see the shadows cast through the leaves, but I wanted it MORE. So I edited engine source to make SSS non energy conserving so I can boost the backfaces :D

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 03/04/2026

A cool small detail that no one will probably ever notice, but the clocks actually work! I got to play with vertex animations in the material to move the hands in sync with the game time to achieve this effect. I love little details like this!

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 24/03/2026

Something related to the Translucent Lighting Volume? Seems like when any translucent particle is outside the second TLV cascade the resolution of the lighting volume drops and is sampling imperfect shadow? (or VSM issues?) Can't get this to repro in a new scene tho :\

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 23/03/2026

Does anyone know why my particles are flickering? I thought it was related to lumen, but it happens with lumen disabled. Only happens on the translucent particles (not the masked/dithered ones). Material is Volumetric Directional. I'm at my wits end!

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