Everyone knows it’s easy to start a project, but getting back to it when the excitement fades? That’s where the real struggle is. In this episode, I’m looking at how hard it is to maintain momentum—whether it’s podcasting or working in Unreal Engine—and how easily we get distracted by "shiny object syndrome," playing with Metahumans instead of actually building the world.

I also break down how I navigated this year’s Black Friday sales. I’ve realized that my materialism has shifted; I don't want physical objects anymore, I want digital ones. I want the satisfaction of owning 3D scans and building a virtual library, even if I never use half of it. I finally dipped into my wishlist to buy the Scans Factory Rome Italian Town pack. After using the Matrix City Sample for so long, I realized I needed to get away from that cold, cruel New York vibe and find something cozier—inspired by those beautiful Mediterranean levels in Hitman.

But building this movie brought me to a frustrating roadblock: Metahumans don’t have clothes. The new system is great, but unless you want a character in underwear or a sci-fi warrior suit, you’re out of luck. I rant a bit about the state of the marketplace—where a pair of virtual jeans costs €41 (which is what I’d pay for real trousers)—and why I refuse to spend €150 just to dress one background character.

This pushed me to a new solution: I picked up a license for Marvelous Designer. It’s a steep learning curve, but I’m excited to start stitching my own custom assets, even if it means working on a MacBook on the train. I also touch on the "hidden costs" of virtual production, including the "black magic" of Windows Firewalls blocking my new iPhone head rig for facial capture. Finally, to keep myself accountable, I committed to a four-year hosting deal with Hostinger—so now I have no excuse not to share the work I’m creating.

Takeaways:

• It's easy to start a project, but maintaining excitement and commitment is much harder over time.
• Black Friday can be a great opportunity to save money, but it's crucial to avoid impulse buying and stick to a wishlist.
• When creating virtual environments in Unreal Engine, managing asset clutter is essential for maintaining efficiency and creativity.
• The transition from physical to digital assets changes our perception of ownership and necessity, especially in creative projects.
• Investing in quality digital assets can enhance a project significantly, but it requires careful consideration of budget and utility.
• Finding appropriate outfits for digital characters can be surprisingly expensive and time-consuming, highlighting the challenges in digital fashion.

Links referenced in this episode:

• My personal podcast (cMonkX Podcast)
• hostinger.com
• fab.com
• Rome - Italian City - Unreal Engine Asset (Environment from Scans Factory)
• Face Motion Capture Head rig
• Hitman Game
• Unreal Engine :)

Email me at cmonkxxx@gmail.com

Keywords:

podcasting, Unreal Engine, Black Friday deals, digital assets, environment design, metahuman outfits, virtual clothing, 3D modeling, project management, asset optimization, creative workflow, game development, animation techniques, virtual reality, podcast production, content creation, digital marketplace, asset packs, online resources, creative accountability

Hello, everybody.

Thank you for returning for the second episode.

I want to tap myself on the back because it's, of course, easy to start the project.

It's a lot harder to get back to it.

As time goes, excitement typically falls, and this is where abandoning of the project, moving on to something else usually happens.

Now, I'm talking about podcasting, which is a great example of that.

Podcasting takes time and a lot of effort, a lot of tedious work.

But also the same thing can be said about working Unreal Engine because there is so many of compelling little things that are so capable of distracting us and taking our horror attention.

And just before you know it, you sat down to work on, let's say, world creation, and a couple of minutes later, you may find yourself, I don't know, playing with metahuman or buying some assets that you didn't really need to start with, but they were compelling, they were on sale.

And speaking of sales, of course, we are now approaching the end of Black Friday week.

How does it really work?

Is it Black Friday, the Friday, or is it a week, really?

And I'm seeing the extends even longer than that.

I'm not.

I'm not from us, and I guess I'm not really tapping too well into that idea of Black Friday, but I do appreciate it.

I do appreciate it when it happens.

This year I was, I'm happy to say I was well prepared with catching those deals because I took, you know, I put a lot of discipline not to buy things I don't really need.

For the last couple of months, I was sort of really overthinking what.

What do I really find tempting, what do I really need?

And I've managed to really stay away from buying things just because they seem appealing, because they seem useful.

So now, once the Black Friday or Black Week came about, I realized, okay, well, I've saved up some money for those last couple of months.

I've saved up and I still have this list of my wish list right now.

What's really healthy, it's actually one of the method not to overspend on anything is you make the list and you don't execute on it immediately.

You wait a little bit and see how long those needs really are valid for.

Because it's very likely that you wanted something in a moment and then you slept on it and, well, next day you find yourself it was just a whim, you were under influence of a moment or a YouTube review or whatever, and you don't really need it.

So that's how it usually goes.

As far as buying unnecessary things, anyway, I had my wish list, I had some money to spend, and this incredible week of deals came about.

Now I. I'm not really big materialist myself.

When I buy something, it usually has to have some good, valid, solid utility behind it.

And ever since I got into Unreal Engine, I found myself appreciating digital things, digital items over physical items.

You know, I found it actually way before getting into Unreal Engine.

Since I started with Blender, I realized that I can download all of those free scans of objects and I can sort of place them in virtual space, in 3D space, and I can kind of get a kind of not illusion, but sense of owning them.

I don't have the object, but I have this realistic scan that I can place somewhere.

I can duplicate it, I can walk around it, I can put headset on and see it in virtual reality, of course.

But this, this was sort of for me like a turning point where I shifted my need to own physical objects towards wanting to get digital stuff.

So while I moved into Unreal Engine, I found it really compelling to build those worlds, to place models in the space, to craft landscape, because it's really satisfying, empowering, and it's a really interesting, well optimized workflow.

Just drag and drop, you arrange things, you group things.

You may not know how to optimize those objects, those meshes.

But even without that, even while making all the mistakes, you can still create a nice mock up over the space, right?

So I end up doing a lot of this, but I would always encounter this.

I would always encounter those two problematic moments where one, I would run out of the hard drive space.

At the beginning, I was working of a gaming laptop with just one terabyte hard drive space.

So that was one limit.

The other one, my project would turn out to be so bloated, so full of models that, you know, that arrived with some packs with some imported levels.

And I would rather ignore those assets as opposed to deleting them and keeping my project neat.

But most likely I would just over overload my levels with assets that didn't really contribute that much.

And again, I didn't care about optimization either.

So things would get slow, things would get heavy and.

And messy.

And messy.

I don't know, does it sound familiar with you just you keep on dragging meshes onto the level to kind of maybe find a place for them later on, but you actually never do and you have this group of meshes in one area of the map that you were meaning to move somewhere else.

But now there's like 30 items and they are no fun to rearrange.

Well, I had a lot of that and that eventually contributed for me to not to get into environment design because I feel like it really requires a lot of discipline to create as much as you can with as few meshes as possible and with as few materials as possible.

You know what I mean?

When you download some, some pack some a level made by a professional, when you go to that overview level, you may notice that only, I don't know, 30, 50 meshes are used to create the entire level, which may be actually quite big.

And 50 is not that much.

You know, if you consider you've got 10 meshes that represents, you know, different plants and trees, you know, 10 or maybe 20 for buildings, 10 for some attributes of the space.

I don't know, a vase or a chair, table.

Right.

It really quickly adds up and you know, 50 is 50 models is not that much.

So I realized that's, that's interesting conundrum and it's definitely like a soft skill that one needs to obtain in order to make sense out of world creation.

It's a really tricky one.

I find it to be very tricky.

Anyway, I, I started to look at level packs and, you know, downloadable levels.

And of course, every two weeks we, we are gifted by epic.

We are gifted to.

To accumulate where we can accumulate those wonderful free resources.

Right now I'm looking at this limited time free collection for late November.

Well, this one is available until the 2nd of December.

We've got painting skybox back.

We've got Lake Town, which is an environment, and then we've got futuristic warrior character.

So when I look at this Lake Town, right.

It's interesting, dark arbor environment.

It's a little bit.

Yeah, it's interesting.

It looks like a scene from somewhere.

In fact, I think I've seen a tutorial.

I think I did a tutorial with a guy who was actually showing how he did it.

Yeah.

And I remember he was using a lot of PCG to create those huts, those wooden houses to the point where, you know, every roof, even every plank was a PCG element.

And he would just create all those villages out of a couple of kinds of planks.

I don't know, maybe I'm confusing videos and, and, and levels.

But my point, my point.

What's my point?

My point here is you can download those environments and they usually come with a map that's really nicely laid out and it's kind of ready to go right now.

I find that maybe the levels that are being offered for free are for free for a reason.

They're not that good.

Maybe they're like very niche.

So they serve a particular story, but you cannot really use them for anything.

Like, there is a mood, there is a style that's really hard to get into with your own story.

So I don't know about you, but I. I keep them stored on my collection.

Most of them, like, huge part of them I never use.

And that brings me back to this idea of, you know, collecting digital items.

You.

It's kind of irrelevant if you use them or not.

Sorry.

If you have them or not, if you never use them.

Right.

So I've got.

I don't know how many assets I've got in my library.

My library doesn't even say.

It kind of doesn't say I've got many.

And I probably will not use most of them.

So it's a little bit like I don't really have them.

I have right to use them at some point.

Anyway, let's go back to the main topic here.

I was very curious about using or buying or getting somehow premium asset packs.

Premium assets, Premium asset packs.

And while I'm working on my own project, which, you know, it's a.

At this point, it's a movie or as a.

It's a video series.

The thing takes place in a city.

I started with kind of a New York environment.

And yeah, I've used the city sample project, the Matrix demo.

Buildings and cars and pedestrians.

So you get an idea.

Most of my work was actually done and I was just kind of creating mess around it to make it look less like Matrix demo sample City sample project.

So I, I wanted to actually change the theme because the New York, while it's interesting, it's.

I find it to be a little bit cold and cruel.

I decided to go for more cozy, comforting, relaxed space.

And around that time, I think I was playing Hitman.

Hitman the game.

You know, there's this level, I think it's like Italian.

It's definitely like a Mediterranean town by the, by the, by the sea.

And it's so beautiful.

I mean, it's such a beautiful level.

It's a great level for Hitman game.

But you also get to appreciate this town.

And you, you can walk around and there are those people chilling, you know, like, just really having this, this peaceful time.

And you're a killer walking among them, among them and doing your thing.

But then, you know, this struck me and I realized, well, this is.

This is a nice atmosphere.

This is A nice vibe I would like to have in my game.

And this is where I discovered Scans Factory.

I believe my timeline might be a little bit off, but just to keep things simple, I saw that they released this Rome Italian Town asset pack.

Again, it's Scan's Factory, Rome Italian Town.

And it was Featured widely by YouTubers, by blogs, and I just couldn't resist.

It's fantastic.

It's absolutely great.

Now, it came with a price, I believe it.

When I saw.

Okay, when it was released, it was actually priced quite competitively.

Quite.

It was really, it was below €100, I think, but.

And I knew it was a discounted price, like a early, early price type of thing.

Early bird.

And I knew it will get more expensive and I didn't buy it.

And then when it, when the price jumped up, I immediately regretted it.

Apologies, notifications are going off.

I regret it.

And then I kept on looking at this asset pack for four weeks, for months, and at that time it was, you know, twice as much.

And I just, you know, I couldn't justify spending like €200, you know, whatever it was to get this because I, I always thought, well, I can, I can substitute this with other models.

I can, you know, it's not really holding me back.

It's nice to have, but I, I don't want to spend so much money for it.

And now recently in this Black Friday offering, it was discounted to, I think just slightly below €100.

I don't remember right now.

And I, I took a couple of days to think about it and eventually I did buy it and I'm really, really happy with it.

So I've got my environment, I've got metahuman.

That's still not a custom metahuman.

And I think I'll make an episode about creating my own custom metahuman.

Here I've got some animations not made by me, but some that I can use to get started.

And that's about it, right, that's, that's kind of what you need.

Well, no, in order to produce your, your film, you need a bit more.

And those little additional bits are the hidden cost of virtual film production, I think.

So, yeah, you can, you can download an animation of a dancing metahuman and you can create like nice little clip.

But that's not really a story, right?

That's just a little tech demo at best.

And it would be kind of ridiculous to have this Italy as a backdrop and have your metahuman dancing or whatever walking.

Right.

It's just, it's Kind of like nothing, right?

It's fun.

It's fun to play around with it.

But if that's what I'm doing, well, then maybe I should stick with playing Hitman, because that's all I do.

I just play with.

Was a little bit frustrating and disappointing because what happened was I realized that I need to invest a little bit more.

And again, I've used this Black week offering, and I got a head rig, this helmet with a mount for an iPhone, and I got it delivered last week.

Now, this is also a separate episode that I'm gonna create on that.

But the thing is, I haven't really used it yet.

I tested it.

I had difficulties connecting my iPhone to my PC.

I didn't really know what the problem is.

Turns out it turned out there was a firewall problem or a block on the firewall level, which is.

It's kind of like it.

It went through my mind that that might be the thing.

But, you know, firewall, I never really got to understand how firewall really works.

I understand you can block applications, but, like, the nuances, it's always a little bit just black magic, you know?

And why is firewall blocking this instead of asking me if it's okay to block it?

Well, maybe it's just Windows.

Anyway, I've managed to.

One evening, I've managed to solve this problem.

I unlocked the live link app to listen to iPhone, and I get my head rig working.

I still don't have my full body animation, but.

But I think I will use some mixamo animations to start with.

And, yeah, that's also, I guess, I suppose, another episode idea to record about the full body tracking solutions that are out there.

Of course, there's a lot of YouTube videos that gives you a good insight into how one system compares to another.

Let me play with that a little bit, and I will report back in forthcoming episodes.

Now, another thing that not that many people talk about is the.

The problem with outfits, metahuman outfits.

All right, so we, of course, get to appreciate.

Sorry, let me just appreciate my coffee.

It's getting cold.

We get to appreciate this new metahuman system that's deployed locally.

It's a lot more.

Well, it's production ready.

Right?

It's as many optimizations.

It's a really good system.

Although, of course, there are some haters that will say, well, metahuman doesn't look realistic.

It's bloated, it's slow, whatever.

I like it.

I appreciate.

It's free, and it's realistic enough for me.

For what I need it to be.

The problem is that with this new generation, they removed cloth clothing.

All the new metahumans, when you deploy them into your level, they just wear either underwear or a white T shirt and white shorts.

And that's fine, I guess, but it's not good enough.

Like, you need to, you need to get your outfits.

So what are your options here?

You can go through your assets and you can find some metahuman outfits that are maybe scattered around your levels.

But good luck.

I mean, if you're building some project that uses some medieval style or, you know, like something really heavily stylized, you.

You will find, you will find something that may suit, just like in this free asset that I saw in FAB this week.

The futuristic warriors.

Sorry, futuristic warrior.

Cyber warrior.

Okay, so this guy, he's wearing a cape.

He's practically topless.

He's got trousers, boots and cape.

Now this will not work with my Italian town.

And you know, I, I need like normal clothes, civilian clothes, more than modern clothes.

Right.

Also, nothing too warm because my scene is set in Italy.

I went on FAB to look at, you know, what can I get for free?

Not much.

If I go to metahuman on fab, I get to see this maintenance worker outfit and some female.

Female stuff.

Not great.

Not great at all.

Hold on, I'm going there now.

Metahuman outfit.

Yeah.

So there's this.

The brand is called Nice pictures.

They do.

I never bought anything from them, but what they have is quite impressing, quite impressive.

But the price tag is also quite impressive.

In fact, when I'm looking at some of those things, I'm looking at trousers.

And they are.

Right now they're on sale for €20.

The regular price is €41 for pair of virtual jeans.

Now I understand it takes a lot of effort.

It takes a license for software, skill, talents.

41 bucks for a.

For virtual trousers for a civilian like me, for non for profit project.

It's obscene because this is the price for regular clothes.

This is what I.

What I would buy for my own trousers.

And I, I probably need some new trousers as well.

So do I buy trousers for my metahuman or do I buy trousers for myself first?

Right.

And it's just trousers.

So if we pair it with say a jacket.

Jacket is 30.

It's a blazer shirt, 20.

So we've got already like €90.

No weight.

40.

70.

Yeah, €90.

Don't forget shoes.

So we are above €100 plus accessories like backpack, maybe hat.

Right, you're 150.

Let's say for the full outfit for your metahuman, that's generally free otherwise, and that's just one outfit.

So what am I supposed, so am I supposed to spend 150 for all of my, like, per, per the character?

It's, it's really unrealistic.

It's, it's a. Yeah.

And you can get packs again.

You can buy some collections.

You can maybe repurpose the outfit, change colors.

But, yeah, I don't think it's good enough.

Now I'm, I'm seeing another seller.

His name is Le Baron Market.

He's selling, like, full outfits, and he's selling it for 10 bucks now.

It's a good deal, possibly, but the rating is really low, and I, I, I'm a little bit suspicious.

I really don't know.

I kind of don't trust this.

Well, okay, there's, there are some new disclaimers that I didn't see before.

It seems like there were some hesitations and some confusion among buyers.

I'll look into that.

I don't want to do it now, but, yeah, it's.

So basically, my point is finding clothes for your metahumans is expensive.

It's expensive purchase, it's time consuming, and, you know, all of that, I'm, I'm sharing those options.

And this is really not the case of getting what you had in mind.

It's just something that you could get out of the store, out of options that are made available.

And there's, there is not many options.

I don't think there is many options because, yeah, there is a big resource, big database, but there is a lot of styled outfits, you know, for, like, futuristic stuff.

Like, a lot of futuristic stuff.

A lot of medieval, lot of scary.

A lot of, like, zombie, Zombie outfits.

So I realized, okay, I need to make my own.

I need to make my own clothes.

And as far as I can see, as I, as far as I can tell, realistically, there are two solutions.

Meta Tailor, Meta Taylor and Marvelous Designer.

Both are quite expensive.

Again, it's a license you need to buy.

It's a subscription.

So you don't buy it indefinitely.

You buy it for whatever period of time you want to work on with this.

And there is a lot of learning.

There is a lot of learning now because it's Black Friday week.

That's another deal.

I got, I got the Marvelous Designer software, and I was really surprised.

It also is available on the Mac.

It's something that I will definitely appreciate when I travel and I take my MacBook.

Creating some virtual clothes on the go on the train, on the plane will be quite a nice task because it's like very isolated, you know, I can work on a, on a, you know, set of shoes and whatever, trousers while being on the train.

And I don't need to worry about big project.

I can just work on this one thing.

So I think I can actually make it happen.

Anyway, I got this piece of software which is not cheap, it was expensive, but I really feel like it's a niche that's worth considering as specialization because if other people are in this situation, well, it means that it's a problem that needs to be solved.

Now I'm not saying I will create fast fashion for digital assets because that would be neat, you know, to just produce a lot of clothes for humans or whatever characters and create mass produced stuff.

But we'll see.

I mean, I feel like I would like to create quality assets, but first I need to learn how to make them properly.

I already did some samples, some T shirts, some blazers, and there are some templates you can, you know, get started with.

But there's a long way to go.

It's.

It's a huge field of knowledge.

Once again, you know, I'm not complaining because it's really cool to learn all of those things.

To learn about creating environment, to learn about metahuman, about animation, about.

About some interactions and now clothes.

Like it was the biggest surprise for me.

Honestly, I had no idea.

It's so complex.

And now I do know, Now I do realize that this is another thing that will slow me down a little bit.

Now I really don't want it to slow me down too much.

So what I'm going to do is I will just render some basic clothes and just so I can create my animation before the year is over.

So I have my environment that I bought metahuman that I created.

I'm going to record my face animation.

It's going to be animated using mixamo animations, maybe some custom stuff.

If I have enough time, I will get that metahuman dressed up.

Because another alternative I thought of was what if I make him naked and he's sort of like sitting in a bath, right?

Because you could find a scenario where you kind of don't need clothes, right?

You can, I don't know, make it suspended naked in some void, right.

It could be, you know, it could be he could be in bed.

Maybe that's not the easiest solution because we need all of those physics for the bed as he's moving around.

But anyway, so I think I can make it happen.

But I was really surprised how complex it all have gotten.

And I have to say I'm excited, but also quite disappointed that this came to me like that, you know, that there was no free or easy solution with shoes.

I've seen people find it easier to scan shoes in real life.

Like to scan their own shoes and create like a basic mesh, static mesh, I think, as opposed to buying shoes for metahuman and you know, so there are creative ways, uh, if, if I, if I find out about some that maybe prove that I'm over complicating my process, I will let you know.

But hey, that's.

That's where I am today.

Now.

Another tricky thing is the actual performance.

So I'm.

I'm doing some writing.

I'm.

I wrote a bit of a background story, but I still have no opening monologue.

I'll try to maybe get something written down, maybe edit it with AI, just.

Just get.

Get nicely optimized.

But this is something, what I saw earlier on, there is so many tools that require problem solving and that it feels like a creative work.

But you know, it's not really creative work at all.

It's a technical work.

Right.

So you see, like everything that I've been talking about here, I've been problem solving something that's just kind of generic and there is no really outcome.

It's just solving one step at a time in order to move me forward.

But you know, if I was to stop right now, there is no output.

There is nothing.

There's no result of my work.

There are just expenses and you know, time and energy used.

It's kind of frustrating, but I think it will also make the joy of accomplishing something a lot higher.

So that's my hope.

And I'll be working this week to get something rendered.

So I hope in the next episode you will see some initial scenes, at least something that incorporates all of those elements I mentioned before.

Yeah.

And I think I still make a bit of a easier shortcut type of thing because it's not going to be a game, it's going to be a movie.

So I'm just scripting and narrowing down everything that happens.

So.

Man, if that was supposed to be a game with all of those components, I guess you don't need animations then.

But okay.

Last thing to add into this episode.

I'm looking for a place to store my work.

I'm not a.

Well, I'm just going to say I'm not a fan of social media.

I don't like social Media.

I probably will end up having Instagram because that's where maybe future clients could be.

But I will be kind of really dry and commercial on Instagram.

I think I'm gonna create Instagram profile from my virtual clothing brand.

That's right, you've heard it.

You've heard me right.

But apart from that, I want to create a WordPress site on top of my website for the podcast.

And I will, I will release that very soon as well.

And that's to conclude my episode.

That's the last deal I got on Black Friday.

I think it is.

I think it is.

I got a very nice web hosting deal with Hostinger.

I got four years of hosting and domain for like €100, which is, it's like for four years.

I think I would need to pay before like 600 maybe.

Incredible deal.

And I just idea of having a website for four years.

It's kind of neat.

You know, I used to have websites before, but I would keep them for a year maybe.

You know, I'd create a portfolio site just so I could get a job and then I wouldn't like to have it because it would feel like outdated or old or I would just dislike it.

But now I'm going to have this website for four years.

So I think I actually accomplished something well in a website.

Having a website helps to keep you accountable because you're sharing your work.

It's no longer just on my hard drive and you get to render things just to show them on your blog or whatever.

So I'm really excited about this.

I really am.

Yeah.

So that's about it.

Maybe as a additional point, I also have used but Black Friday stuff, the Black Friday offering with my podcast.

I got, I think, nice deal.

Discount podcasting isn't cheap.

Okay, you're hosting audio, but they also take care of distribution in a way they do a lot.

But you know, YouTube spoiled us a lot with the fact that you can host your videos for free.

Why am I paying, you know, €200 for hosting audio?

It's kind of weird.

Why am I paying?

Yeah, there are free.

There are free podcast hosting solutions.

But yeah, it's maybe partially a problem why I lost my podcast.

I'll get into that some other time.

Or you, you can in fact maybe hear about this in my personal podcast that I am also producing.

It's called seamonkx podcast and it's also hosted on the same hosting platform.

I explained what happened with my previous podcasts and how free hosting is sometimes the worst thing you can do.

Because, yeah, things will not last.

Things are out of your control.

So, yeah, all right.

I've been talking for quite some time.

I'm.

I'm still not verse.

And, yeah, I'm not.

I'm not into podcasting for over one hour.

I would like to be, but I'm not there yet.

I just told you, I have at least two podcasts now that are announced, but there will be more.

I feel like I will end up having.

I will end up having to record podcast a day in order to maintain those projects.

Again, this project is just to keep me accountable, my 3D work accountable.

And again, I want to connect with you.

I want to hear from you.

I want to hear your feedback.

It's very important to me.

And you can write to me.

Email is visible in show notes.

Write to me an email if you.

If you find that I am missing something, if you think I overspent, if you think I'm completely delusional and lost, let me know.

Write me an email and I will mention you in the next episode.

Or we can even connect and have a nice, lively discussion and brainstorming.

And of course, you.

You can also approach me and we can talk about your project.

That's something I'm considering also in the future.

All right, thank you for listening.

I'll speak to you soon, probably within the next week.

Take care.