You don't need a high-end workstation to make a dent in a complex project; sometimes a MacBook in a quiet room is actually better for pure technical focus. Lately, I’ve been trading brute-force rendering for smarter workflows—specifically, 3D scanning physical shoes ordered online to bypass the friction of manual modeling in Unreal Engine.

The real challenge isn't the software, though—it’s the information decay. I’m wrestling with the steep learning curve of Marvelous Designer and the struggle of retaining technical "how-to" knowledge when the tech moves faster than your memory. I'm moving my personal knowledge base from scattered Google Docs into a public-facing blog. It’s an effort to externalize my brain and create a visual companion for these updates, turning the messy process of learning MetaHumans and garment design into something useful for others.

The Reality Check:

• The Travel Rig: Why the limitations of a MacBook can actually force you to focus on learning tools like Marvelous Designer instead of just getting lost in high-fidelity renders.
• The Scanning Hack: Using physical products and 3D scanning to skip the "boring" parts of asset creation and get straight to the environment design.
• Knowledge Management: Fighting the "tutorial trap" by building a structured, searchable personal archive to stop learning the same thing twice.
• The Public Portfolio: Transitioning from private projects to a documented blog to force accountability and help the creator community.

Tech & Resources Mentioned:

• 3D Tools: Unreal Engine, Marvelous Designer, MetaHuman, Blender.
• Hardware: MacBook Pro (Portable 3D Workflow).
• Platforms: Zalando (for asset sourcing), WordPress, FAB.
• Contact: cmonkxxx@gmail.com

Hello.

Welcome back and thank you for tuning in.

I'm really glad you're here.

Maybe you are going through Unreal Engine resources, trying to fulfill your New year's resolution.

Maybe 3D is where you want to get into this year, or maybe you want to take it seriously for the first time.

I don't know what it is for you.

For me, this year is just like any other.

I look forward to working what the new solutions will be given to us, what kind of tools, what kind of software, what kind of assets, all that.

It ends up being transformative, but in the end, it's really how we apply ourselves to it is what matters.

So what I did for the last few weeks was quite meaningful for me.

It really pushed me forward significantly.

I went away from my workstation, I was traveling, I went to France, and obviously I couldn't take my powerful PC.

All I had with me was my MacBook, my M3, MacBook Pro.

And it was okay to do tutorials, which I did.

I did maybe like 10 hours altogether.

I could say I know marvelous designer by now.

I would say maybe like 90%.

There's still a bit of a. Yeah, I would say there's a bit of a mystery still.

But that's okay.

That's okay.

There's still just exciting stuff that I can learn.

I feel like I still.

I still am.

Well, that would be an interesting thing to figure out.

Like, how much of Unreal Engine do I know?

Gosh, back in the day, I would say, oh, I know maybe 80%.

But the more I know, the more of Unreal Engine I know, I realize I know less.

It's weird.

It's weird.

I mean, the fact is they're always adding new features and it's up to you if you actually want to learn how to use them, if you even need them.

I don't know.

It's.

It's such a vast universe of.

Of knowledge.

What I personally dislike is forgetting I.

One of my biggest challenges, how do I keep the knowledge that I have already acquired?

Now I personally, how I deal with it is I have this word, not word, Google Doc with different tabs, and each tab represents a different aspect.

There might be cinematics, there might be metahuman, there might be rendering.

There is a garment creation.

My marvelous designer tab.

And I'm just pasting links and thoughts and processes.

It's kind of okay.

I used to use some content management applications like Notion, Evernote, and, you know, all that stuff.

But in recent years, I decided to move away from it because it was Just over complicating things.

It was becoming too proprietary.

I went with just simple Google Doc, which is not that simple anymore.

I feel like with the addition of tabs you can really structure your information and to you can really make it, make it work for you.

And I like that.

It's just part of, it's just yet another tool out of Google umbrella.

You know, I don't mind that it's all Google centric, but I am looking for alternative solutions.

So one of them would be my website.

I'm thinking about sharing while documenting, collecting and sharing my online resources.

So I'm in the process of setting up the blog and I'm hoping to launch it this weekend.

Even in simplest form, it's going to be a WordPress site.

It will start fairly simple, it'll be a blog, couple of static pages and in the end I'll be posting my projects there.

It will become a portfolio and I'm thinking of sharing my favorite tutorials with others.

So maybe I'll get some feedback and corrections or maybe voluntary submissions.

Yeah, I just, I'm really happy with this Google Doc, but I don't like that it's in a vacuum and it's just there and maybe I'm becoming a little bit more, a little bit more, more lazy with it.

I'm just pasting link and closing it.

Whereas if I think of it as I'm publishing my resources, I'll be more deliberate and more analytical and more aware of what I'm doing with it.

So that's the idea.

There'll be a website.

There will be.

It will also become a web page for this podcast, which I'm hoping it will attract more, more audience, which I cannot complain, audience is increasing.

This is really make me happy.

I mean I would be podcasting regardless, but the fact that people are listening, that's really cool.

Majority of people come from us, which is not really a big surprise.

But yeah, yeah, it's all great.

Welcome on board.

I don't really know what brings you here.

What I don't know if this podcast is satisfying your expectations, needs, but I always feel like we're only at the beginning and there will be more coming and I'm just hoping there will be more substance and it'll be more of the actual resource.

But I don't want this podcast to become yet another highly pragmatic, goal oriented podcast.

I still want to share, share pure enthusiasm and excitement that comes from being in this, you know, I also want to be free to share my frustrations, but I Don't want to complain.

Don't worry.

There will be no complaining.

Not too much, just a little bit.

Half of it.

A big portion of it.

All right, let's see.

Let's see.

You know, maybe for some of you, you don't know my story.

I went into this garment design business.

Well, not yet the topic, because I really want to complete my, at this point, animation.

It was meant to be an interactive piece, but I decided to keep it simpler.

So it's going to be a short.

Maybe a series of shorts, and I just need to put some clothes on my metahumans.

And it's really funny how one thing leads to another, and none of this is really moving me closer to completion of this project.

I'm just learning more, and I'm becoming such a good student, but not so good in actually getting things released.

Now I realize that, well, okay, I'm gonna have this scene.

I have a scene.

I have metahumans.

I kind of have them animated already.

I need to put some garments on them.

Oh, I'm missing shoes.

I'm missing shoes on those people.

I saw I can create shoes in metahuman, but process seemed to be quite different from creating clothes, which I find really surprising.

But I did find a really nice hack, and I think this will be a core topic, a core idea of this episode.

All right.

I found that it's quite effective to create shoe assets by simply 3D scanning the actual shoe.

So what I ended up doing is I ended up ordering, like, three pairs of shoes of Zalando.

And to be fair, I. I kept two of those pairs.

Like, I will be actually using some of those shoes.

I'm not just buying and, you know, sending back, but it was such a great thing to order those shoes.

Scan them using, you know, the reality capture app, using my phone, scan them and.

And have them as, like, a very detailed.

Like, a really nice mesh that I can use virtually.

So I have this shoe physically.

I can.

I can wear it.

In fact, I do, and I have it on my model.

It's.

It blows my mind.

And I imagine I could do the same with, like, a flannel shirt, but there will be probably a lot more of fixing and fiddling in order to make that happen.

I know by now that creating garments in 3D is.

And 4 3D is quite specific and quite, quite difficult, But I enjoy it.

I enjoy.

You know, that's the thing.

I enjoy going through each one of those obstacles and challenges.

And I think creating.

Creating on this website will make me more.

More into the sense into a position where I can say I'm actually accomplishing something, you know, so I will, I think I will end up publishing those shoe models that I've made and I know if I wouldn't have this website I would, probably wouldn't really care but because my mindset wouldn't be so heavily rooted in the publishing aspect, you know, I'd be, oh yeah, I created shoes.

I have them on my hard drive.

Maybe I'll use them at some point in my project or I'm planning to, but I, I kind of forgot I have them and I now I have this metahuman character with shoes already in.

So this asset, all this effort essentially dies.

You know what I mean?

Like I have a lot of half baked projects that I, they just there with some issues on my hard drive and at some point, at some point my hard drive will run out of space and I will need to delete some of those projects that could have, could have been something, could have became something.

Yeah.

So I think that's, that's what has been on my mind lately.

And yeah, year begun with quite a lot of distractions.

Mainly family life.

Yeah.

Like it's now 10th of January.

I've spent all this time with the family.

Pretty much all the time I had afterwards was just not enough energy to really get into creative mindset.

I don't know how it is for you, but in order for me to work with those tools, with 3D tools, I really need to, I really need to work on getting into a flow and it's, you know, I've been editing some videos while being on the train and that's super easy because you just open your application and you move the timeline, you, you cut, you drag your clips with Unreal Engine, it's like if you want to migrate some assets or maybe I'm not at that point of my career where I can do it as easily, but I know I have this scene and for me in my head it's entirely different world.

I need to get there.

I need to look around, I need, I need to see what's up.

I need to kind of see what's working.

Sometimes I want to just play with it a little bit and only then I can start creating.

It's a very different magical thing and quite often I need to set a lot more time for it in order to get something done.

It's, I mean, I appreciate it.

I don't like it.

It's not the best thing.

But I also wonder if this is some kind of A mental block, something I'm looking for excuses for, you know, like, wouldn't it be nice to remember that I actually really, really love this kind of work and I can just take any moment in the day and sit down to it, make some changes, do some edits and expand even 15 minutes and get something done.

Man, I feel like working with Unreal Engine can consume a lot of time on doing nothing constructive.

Like I mentioned, moving assets in this process of working on garments.

I mean, synchronizing outfits from marvelous designer to Unreal Engine, that's quick.

But then if I say want to work on the metahuman blueprint for some reason, if I want to change something, change, let's say the body type.

And if I want to go into the metahuman creator, that's half an hour.

Even though my computer is fast saving, trying, rendering, downloading, textures, all of this is just taking so much time.

So sometimes I know I have half an hour and I barely get to do this admin work, so to speak.

You know, it's maybe at this point I am complaining.

Maybe.

I wonder how you guys do it.

I wonder what's your flow, what's way of thinking.

I would really love to hear from you guys.

How do you resonate with what I just said?

I don't really want to use any social networks and I think this is a perfect use case for it.

Maybe I'll set up like a discord thing, I don't know.

But I think in a way I've been quite good lately with creating of communities.

I've set up this Reddit post that attracted say 30 people onto WhatsApp group that I've created.

And it has been very beautiful.

Like we are about to meet and have dinners, get togethers and that was just purely the purpose for it was I want to have more friends.

What would be the anchor that I could connect with people that are that like what I like, but they're not just like me, you know, I'm not looking for a copy of myself.

I'm looking for strangers that have the same points of interests that I can learn from.

So I really surprised myself with how well I did this thing, how well it's working, people are connecting, people are becoming friends through something I've created.

So I'm thinking I will end up doing some kind of a community work for my 3D path, just to be connected with you listeners.

But for now I'm using just my email email that I have specifically for my podcasting journey.

It's simonkxxmail.com and you can find it in Shownotes as well.

So please do get in touch.

And if you want to be on this podcast, you're more than welcome to participate.

As you can see, it's really low key, relaxed.

It's just meandering, babbling, rambling about Unreal Engine related things.

All right, I don't think I'll be talking for much longer.

Let's keep it under 20 minutes.

Let's see.

I can see timeline coming closer to 20 for the next week or so.

I want to work on my animation, but also something that I became aware of is this game engine, game engine for Blender.

I've been using Blender in and out and I, it's.

I've been talking about forgetting how to do things, man, how much I forgot about Blender.

And there's this Blender 5 right now I may need to do the donut tutorial and I need to update my knowledge.

So that's probably another two days out of my, you know, capacity.

I mean, learning is.

And staying up to date.

It's such a big part of this process.

But I want to see.

I mean, wouldn't it be nice to be entirely into one, one application that does it all?

And Blender kind of is like that.

I mean, I'm not really into making games right now, but I, I do enjoy kind of walking around environments that I create.

So yeah, I want to explore this Blender game engine and I want to maybe at least do a trailer or like a teaser for my.

What my animation will be.

I want to publish my shoes.

I want to publish my blog, my WordPress site.

I need, I need to find name for this man.

It's most trivial, dumb excuse not to do something.

I just don't know what, how to name it, how to call it.

I know it really doesn't matter, but ideas that I usually come up with, they are so bad.

They either don't, don't work or they're just the whole situation gets me really stressed.

And yeah, I don't publish because I don't know how to name those things.

But I have some ideas.

I'll try them.

I'll work with AI to get a domain and I'll set the webpage.

Maybe there will be a comment section or something that you can comment too.

All right, I think that's all for today.

There is still a couple of other podcasts I want to record at this point.

I've got a. I think three.

Because you know, on this podcast I don't want to talk about my personal life.

Thus, I do have a personal podcast, like Personal Journal, for better or worse.

I still don't know if this is a good idea, but I do like to talk, and this is my outlet, so I've been doing that.

And yeah, and there is one podcast that I want to do in my native language, which happens to be Polish.

I'm experiencing this kind of surreal, surprising shift to my roots lately, so let's see where that goes.

But for now, we are getting close to 20 minutes, and that's where we're gonna end.

So thank you for listening, and I'll speak to you soon again.

Bye.

Bye.