Morning 23rd (which was Labour Thanksgiving day in Japan, National holiday) I noticed that my PayPal balance had became zero.
I contacted PayPal and they said this was a system error, not unauthorized access. This is what they said in their official statement that came the following day:
This week, you may have noticed that the balance in your PayPal account was temporarily unavailable. Due to a technical issue, a bank withdrawal had been initiated incorrectly, which meant your balance appeared to be transferred out of your PayPal account.
They also said the following
We deeply apologize for any confusion this may have caused. We acted quickly to cancel this bank withdrawal so the balance was not transferred into your bank account.
NHK reported the news. Twitter also responded and Paypal Japan became a trending topic.
I think couple of things to take out of their statement. They said “withdrawal had been initiated incorrectly”. This is bad communication.
Do they mean to say that a bank withdrawal had been made in error? This should be obvious since all users report that they had not themselves initiated the bank withdrawal. Or do they mean that the a bank withdrawal that had been made in error was also somehow incorrectly made.
I actually asked the support if they would just let it go through. But I wasn’t given that option. So this could lead to speculation that not only the withdrawal was made in error it was also initiated incorrectly.
Furthermore the statement said “appeared to be transferred out of your PayPal Account”. Appeared? Transferred to were? So if it only appeared to be the case, it then means that it wasn’t. And out of your PayPal account, is different than saying to users bank account for example.
Not very professional communication to say the least, and I wonder if whoever wrote this is native English speaker. Or..
There is a theory floating around that Japan government is behind this, force testing the automatic withdrawal to Japanese bank accounts. There is actually PayPal notification from May 2021 that says that the accounts that hold large amounts such as those exceeding 1 million yen will be under special scrutiny and maybe automatically forced to withdraw to bank account.
There doesn’t seem to be evidence however that the automatic withdrawal would happen for lesser sums. If Japanese government is to crackdown on some kind of tax avoidance occurring in online banks, it would make sense to target larger sums.
Either way this isn’t good user experience. If this was sincere error, it was a bad one. If this was some kind of covert government move, worse. I was able to get my JPY funds returned, but not the USD which are still floating around somewhere. As of today I have no way of knowing when I will get my money back.
PayPal says they are doing everything they can to make sure this won’t happen in future. Unfortunately I don’t feel too confident about this.
3D Coat 2025 is here
Interesting SoftwareI am super excited about the new 3d coat 2025 that just dropped.
For me 3D coat has been a true passion tool, there is something so attractive about this tool. I have used Adobe Substance 3D for so many years for serious work (I used to work at Adobe in Japan) and to me that is the defacto route for creating realistic textures.
But 3D Coat has so powerful things like volumetric texturing and Substance Designer textures (if exported) can also be used in 3D Coat. With its rock-solid voxel sculpting and a remarkably capable auto-retopology tool, this engine steps into the arena as a serious rival to ZRemesher. The curve tool is legendary, and there is polygon modeling tools as well now. So many things to play around with here. Feeling a bit nostalgic here.
But honestly maybe one of the charm for me is simply the fact that 3D Coat can be purchased perpetually. I have 2023 version and upgrading to 3d Coat 2025 costs only 45EUR.
Huge respect goes to Pilgway for continuing the development for this valuable, unique tool under these difficult times.
So here is what’s new:
(My favorite are the Soft Booleans, Normal maps to geometry and new UI themes that rock.)
(Unsure what the specific support for non-Wacom tablets mean, just purchased XP Pen tablet which now should have extra support)
3d coat 2025 New Features
🎨 Interface & Usability
🧩 Sculpting & Modeling Enhancements
📸 Photogrammetry & Capture
🛠️ 3D Printing & Asset Prep
🖌️ Painting & Texturing
🧠 Workflow & Performance
I will write a proper review once I get my hands on this lovely update!!
Unreal Engine Shader Compilation Slow? Here is one possible reason
Unreal EngineI have had strange issues for several months with Unreal Engine compiling shaders reaaalllly slow. I have tried pretty much everything, but finally I found the possible reason.
Incredibuild.
I was playing around making custom Unreal Engine builds from source and had Visual Studio installed. This in turn installed Incredibuild.
Existence of Incredibuild in the system caused CPU utilization to never reach even 60% and the shader compilation time went about 3X the normal. I had to uninstall that from the Visual Studio installer which is not the most intuitive. But this instantly fixed the issue. Voila. Now my CPU runs at 100% , my room gets hot and fans kick like a jet engine.
But shaders compile in less than eternity.
Crazy freelance work offers in Artstation
UncategorizedI just got offer from a company offering freelance work in Artstation. In addition of asking me to complete free art test they suggested the following:
1- Per model system you will be paid for the model, validated by the client, depending on the complexity level
– Low complexity: 15 euro
– Medium complexity: 19-25 euro
– High Complexity: 27-30 euro
– Casuastic: extreme complexity
If the modeler is doing only the “mesh” part (without textures) , this price would be reduced to 50 %
2- Monthly system assure you a constant volume of production with fixed remuneration
– PRO-modelling level (if you have developed the high level of skills + english )
– Master-modelling level: our basic, designated for modelers who would be creating Mesh and textures for PBR models
– Pro modelling : starting from 700 euro for 10 models all complexity
– Master modeling : 200 euro for 10 models per month all complexity
And the abuse goes on.
So let’s break this down.
High complexity model with textures is in best case 30 euros. High complexity model with textures can easily take a week to make. So in that case daily salary is 6 euro.
The CG industry is soon to become 160 Billion dollar industry. How is this not abuse of artists?
Regarding PayPal system error in Japan
UncategorizedMorning 23rd (which was Labour Thanksgiving day in Japan, National holiday) I noticed that my PayPal balance had became zero.
I contacted PayPal and they said this was a system error, not unauthorized access. This is what they said in their official statement that came the following day:
They also said the following
NHK reported the news. Twitter also responded and Paypal Japan became a trending topic.
I think couple of things to take out of their statement. They said “withdrawal had been initiated incorrectly”. This is bad communication.
Do they mean to say that a bank withdrawal had been made in error? This should be obvious since all users report that they had not themselves initiated the bank withdrawal. Or do they mean that the a bank withdrawal that had been made in error was also somehow incorrectly made.
I actually asked the support if they would just let it go through. But I wasn’t given that option. So this could lead to speculation that not only the withdrawal was made in error it was also initiated incorrectly.
Furthermore the statement said “appeared to be transferred out of your PayPal Account”. Appeared? Transferred to were? So if it only appeared to be the case, it then means that it wasn’t. And out of your PayPal account, is different than saying to users bank account for example.
Not very professional communication to say the least, and I wonder if whoever wrote this is native English speaker. Or..
There is a theory floating around that Japan government is behind this, force testing the automatic withdrawal to Japanese bank accounts. There is actually PayPal notification from May 2021 that says that the accounts that hold large amounts such as those exceeding 1 million yen will be under special scrutiny and maybe automatically forced to withdraw to bank account.
There doesn’t seem to be evidence however that the automatic withdrawal would happen for lesser sums. If Japanese government is to crackdown on some kind of tax avoidance occurring in online banks, it would make sense to target larger sums.
Either way this isn’t good user experience. If this was sincere error, it was a bad one. If this was some kind of covert government move, worse. I was able to get my JPY funds returned, but not the USD which are still floating around somewhere. As of today I have no way of knowing when I will get my money back.
PayPal says they are doing everything they can to make sure this won’t happen in future. Unfortunately I don’t feel too confident about this.
The most common mistake in CG project management and how to fix it
UncategorizedThis is something I have seen so many times. Being somewhat experienced at this point, I have learned how to deal with this (check at the end). But seriously, if you are a project manager in CG project, please do not do this.
The most common mistake in CG team management would be several people giving feedback to artists. Sometimes the people are supervisors of other projects, other artists or some non-CG people who just want to chime in how they feel about the work being done. This is extremely annoying for artists, especially when the feedback from several people is conflicting.
The feedback must come from a single source, the person giving it usually being CG supervisor or art director. Actually if the pipeline is somewhat simple, it doesn’t matter so much if the person giving feedback is really hands on with the project, as long as the person takes responsibility of the feedback. It is no good confirming the work done is okay, only to return to artists with changes a week after. If it is good, then it must be considered as approved work, and further changes must be acknowledged as extra work.
Also if you are CG artist on a project, please do not waste time commenting on others work in company Slack, unless that is specifically required by the lead for some reason. Throwing thumbs up is okay, but even positive feedback can throw off what the actual supervisor has to say. If you notice issue with someone’s work that would have easy fix, feel free to throw them a direct note, but do not pollute the Slack channel.
I have seen this so many times that now usually when this happens, I usually just stop everything I am doing, raise my hands and ask clear direction from the person in charge. But I have also brought up the issue with at least three companies in near past because this was clearly impacting the productivity in major way.
Be clear who is in charge of the particular project’s art direction and make sure your team knows.
150 Billion Dollar Industry
UncategorizedRevisiting the June prediction by SIGGRAPH.
CG Graphics market, that’s 150 Billion and will be 160. Look also how little impact Covid has had to the industry. It is not negligible but the predictions are relatively stable.
Testing 3D software on M1 Max Macbook Pro (32GB model)
Apple Silicon, ZBrushI just bought M1 Max MacBook Pro for production work, here are some tests with 3D software on M1 Max. I want to see if I would be able to use this as a truly portable 3D creation machine. Truly portable meaning something that actually can do 3D on battery power, also without the fans getting wild.
My initial 3D software tests on M1 Max are following:
I will keep testing different 3D software in more lengthy tests, but the initial tests are mind blowing. Especially what Substance Painter was able to pull off, 10 4K UDIM texture sets on multi million quad model is not easy feat for a notebook. While working on this model the fans did not even spin up, and I could do such work in a cafe if I really need to.
Even in it’s current state I cannot see why I wouldn’t be able to use this in production. And if the apps get optimized for M1 this can change the industry.
See also
Here is a handy website for checking which apps are M1 ready.
You should use Movie Render Queue
Unreal EngineRendering out movies in Unreal Engine is somewhat counterintuitive. We can render movies using the Render to Video in Sequencer which gives us the rudimentary options. But we will miss on ability to queue longer renders with this plus we can’t use anti-aliasing. Welcome Movie Render Queue plugin.
You need to enable Movie Render Plugin in Plugins in order to access the settings. IF you need Additional Render passes, make sure you enable also the Movie Render Queue Additional Render Passes plugin.
It is also now possible to render out Prores with Movie Render Queue by enabling. Apple Prores Media plugin. If you intend to use Prores 422 HQ for example, enable this plugin.
Having the plugins installed, you can then access the Movie Render Queue from the Window > Cinematics menu.
Opening the window will give you a clean slate that is a bit confusing.
Clicking the green + Render button will enable us to add any level sequences to it. Then each of the level sequences will have their own settings we can customize, or choose existing preset.
Here I have opened the Setting dialog of the default preset and added .EXR output instead of the default 8-bit .jpg. It is surprising that these .EXR files are 16-bit instead of 32-bit that the standard Sequencer outputs, I should wonder why this is so. We can also change output to Prores or Render method. We can render out path traced animations for example.
What’s great about this is that we have access to Anti-aliasing options here. What I have found that works decently well is having some Spatial Sample Count like 8 or 16 while also adding Temporal Sample Count. Spatial Sample Count increases quality of each frames and Temporal Sample Count helps motion blur, reducing glittering pixels especially on shiny surfaces. I am still experimenting of what would work best for quality while keeping the render time decent enough here.
Lastly we can save the presets. If we want to save each of the sequence outputs to point to a different folder for example we can also do it here.
Definitely use Movie Render Queue if you can, it can save a lot of time and give you a higher quality animations.
See the official documentation of the feature over here.
Unreal, Substance 3D on battery power? Thoughts on 2021 Macbook Pro M1
Apple Silicon, Unreal EngineWhat Apple just announced is definitely fascinating. There is tons to unpack here, but let me just put my thoughts together from the point of view of ex Adobe demo artist who had to run Unreal on a laptop in front of corporate clients.
Running heavy 3D software on notebook (such as Unreal or Substance Painter with something actually in viewport) has so far meant immediately finding outlet and plugging kilograms worth of power brick to outlet. That, or letting the performance die. I can’t stress how huge difference there has been on either plugged or unplugged. To put it simply, without a plug, no 3D, period.
I am quite happy with my 17 inch Zephyrus with 32gigs of memory and a 2080. This works well, as long as it is plugged, and if I set the performance profile to quiet it is also decent quiet, not bad at all. Can also run games in silent mode decently enough. But compiling shaders in Unreal engine is painfully slow when comparing to my AMD tower. If I was to travel and needing to answer to a client work, this would be near undoable, as average shader compile of a new project can take 3X as long as it does on my desktop, the computer being unusable at that time.
Same goes with my 2019 Macbook Pro, by the way, or make that 4X the wait. If Mac would do the same job on battery power, this would be fantastic.
The unified memory is fascinating as well, if Substance Painter got optimization to take advantage of the shared GPU memory, this could potentially challenge RTX3090 machine. I don’t know how feasible this is, but I am a dreamer.
However. At this point it is hard to say how useful the new Mac would be for someone running Substance or Unreal. Unreal key features such as ray tracing support or nanite do require NVidia graphics card which are non-existent at the moment for Apple. I would doubt there will be a workaround for this anytime soon.
No matter how attractive the Apple system is, this would be the deal breaker for me – so many workflows are tied CUDA or Nvidia Raytracing. Also add to this the missing software on Mac. And there is for example the Delighting feature of Substance Sampler.
Cinema 4D and recently Redshift are fascinating though which both run reportedly well on M1. Having Unreal run natively on M1 with Raytracing and Nanite, that would be very interesting.
Most annoying issues in UE5 EA2
Unreal EngineI wanted to list the most annoying problems I have so far with UE5 EA2 and I plan to update this with the fixes as they come. This is written as of October 17th, 2021.
This all said, this still early access and we likely will see most of them addressed in coming months. I also wish the versioning of the early access was made more obvious in the launcher. It is not obvious at all if we are using EA1 or EA2 and so on.
Better way to disable lights (or meshes) in Unreal Engine
Unreal EngineOne of the less intuitive things in Unreal World Outliner is the the way how to hide lights or other objects. Disabling them by clicking on the eye in World Outliner results them turning off in the viewport, however reloading a scene will re-enable them causing confusion. Same goes for everything else.
Better way For lights, toggle Affects World to disable/enable it without deleting the actor/component.
For meshes, toggle either Visible (completely hides it) and/or Hidden in Game (hides in game view but not in editor view) to hide it.
This is definitely a head-scratcher. I think better way is to not to use the eye icon at all.