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?

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 29/09/2026

Thank you, that totally makes sense, I’ll try it out!

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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

Never heard of it! Will look into it, thanks!

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 28/09/2026

Its a pain because there's thickness to the skirt, so I have to make sure I weight both sides properly otherwise the backside clips through the front. And it NEEDs to be thick because of how I'm doing outlines in game. Need to come up with a better way

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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

Thank you my friend. Been feeling pretty discouraged the last few weeks to be honest with the slow progress, and so hearing these kind words is so so appreciated

static.klipy.com

Will Smith: Serious Look

ALT: Will Smith: Serious Look

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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

Lots of different suggestions so far! I guess I should have specified that I'm looking for something that works well with a (small) team to track progress etc, so not just something that's local for just me!

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 08/08/2026

And also see like all the tasks at a glance, laid out at once, instead of trello showing me like 10 tasks at once in this massively tall column.

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 08/08/2026

I don't really want to overcomplicate things with some huge thing. I just want a list of tasks that I can manage, assign, write comments on and upload images to, and track their progress. Google sheet kind of gets me there, but no easy way to add per-task metadata nicely

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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

Niagara system to trace downwards and position the particles. It took me way too long to figure out I had to add the collision thingy in the map get lawl I always struggle with niagara so hard

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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

Sampling from that would spawn an particle on _any_ surface though right? Even tops of trees if they are writing to the scene distance field? Dunno if that work work, good idea though

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 21/07/2026

Can I make a new trace channel on the ground meshes, spawn a particle, trace it downwards, and if it hits that's where it starts? Hmmm

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 21/07/2026

I think there's a niagara landscape interface which would sample the landscape heightmap but... I am not using landscape, just meshes directly for the ground and stuff. So what is the alternative? Can't really just sample the SS buffer because that would pick up treetops too..

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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

Yuck, that's too bad. I guess maybe can grab the sweep result from the SetActorLocation and only apply the rotation if InitialOverlap = false, might stop the penetration from rotation from happening and be good enough

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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

System is easy to set up with as many different materials for flooring/wallpaper as I want (even animated ones!) and they're all colour-customizable just like all other furnitures!

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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

Doing this kind of UI stuff is my least favorite gamedev thing though. I'm struggling so hard to make a passable UI. Adding animations does make it instantly feel way more fun though

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 04/07/2026

Made this little item details panel today

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 04/07/2026

(trying to design a "details" panel in the inventory, that shows item preview and other info, thought it looked like a playing card. Maybe I should make a tcg)

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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 · 27/06/2026

Thanks for the input. I might try it out, looks simple enough to use and I like simple

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 26/06/2026

Looks fantastic! Menus like this are SO much cooler than standard screenspace 2d overlays ontop of the game!

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 26/06/2026

Are you pretty happy with how it works? How's the integration with unreal?

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 26/06/2026

Thanks for the input. Where are you hosting? Have you found any issues/frustrations with git + unreal? That's honestly one of the big reasons that drew me to SVN in the first place. It's stupid simple, especially with larger non-text files, just toss everything into the repo and it's done!

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 26/06/2026

Sounds interesting. Not paying per user, but per hardware sounds developer friendly. Bit disappointed that Assembla is per seat, so would be great to have other viable options in this space for sure

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 26/06/2026

SVN + Assembla seems like an option? Assembla seems to have been around for a long time. Prices are meh, but an investment in insurance making sure my projects are safe I guess. Other options? Git + LFS + Some host? Is working with Git + LFS still annoying with unreal? Is it much diff than SVN?

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Dylan @dylanmeville.com · 26/06/2026

Looks neat. Honestly though it's hard to get onboard with something so new and unfamiliar after using SVN for a decade. Would consider it if there was a reasonable managed cloud solution though!

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