So, let’s kick things off with a little honesty—progress has been pretty much nonexistent on my project lately. Yup, you heard that right! I’ve spent the last couple of weeks just moving some meshes around and calling it a day. Life has thrown a few curveballs my way, mostly in the form of family time and the classic “I just don’t have enough hours in the day” dilemma. But hey, I’m here to chat about it all, including the importance of just staying connected to my project, even if it's just for a few minutes a day. We dive into everything from the joys of creating environments in Unreal Engine to the ups and downs of trying to balance passion projects with daily life—because let’s be real, sometimes you just gotta roll with the punches and find that groove again!

Email me: cmonkxxx@gmail.com

Takeaways:

1. Even if I only have ten minutes, I should still open Unreal Engine to stay connected.
2. Family life can be a whirlwind, but finding time to create is always worthwhile.
3. Productivity can be seasonal; we all have our highs and lows throughout the year.
4. Vibe coding could potentially revolutionize the way we approach creating games in Unreal Engine.
5. The importance of balancing passion work with family life is something we all grapple with.
6. The rise of AI in creative fields could lower barriers for aspiring developers and designers.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

1. Unreal Engine
2. Figma
3. Claude
4. Corsor
5. EPIC

Hello everybody.

Welcome back.

I hope you're doing better than I do.

And for those who are just checking in for the first time, I need to clarify.

You probably came here to get an update on how this ambitious and known developer progresses with his project.

Isn't this what I wrote?

It's a devlog about my progress.

Well, the reason why there hasn't been any episode for the last two weeks is that I haven't done any progress whatsoever.

I mean, if opening my project and moving some meshes around, tweaking my map counts as a progress, well then I've done a little bit.

But in terms of the whole structure, the whole idea, working on cinematics, recording, motion capture, I've done nothing.

And once again, it's the same reason, or I guess there are two reasons really why I've been so inactive lately.

One is just lack of time.

And I'm complaining.

And of course I'm, I'm trying to justify and explain myself.

And this is something what we're all or most of us complain about right now.

Just, I didn't have time.

Well, there's always time that can be made right.

Yeah.

Yes and no.

I don't know.

How about you?

I think I spoke about it before.

For me, in order to get something meaningful done in Unreal Engine, I kind of need to spend at least two hours, get a bit of a warm up first.

I need to look around, I need to get some inspiration, I need to look at things that I need to fix.

Before I get into creative stuff, I need to go through my notes because how quickly do I forget about how to connect things, how to configure things, how certain plugin works?

Yeah, it takes time.

It takes a certain amount of discipline to maintain information.

You've got.

I think so, yeah.

I've been busy.

I've been busy with family life and it's kind of hard to argue, you know what's more important?

I would like to say that no, my passion is my goal here.

I want to do a bit of Unreal Engine no matter what.

And you know what?

That used to be my rule.

Last year there was, you know, I kind of forgot about this.

Now I'm recovering this memory.

I set myself a rule that I would open my project every single day just so I can do it every day, because I want to do it every day.

And you know, now I've been kind of thinking, no, I'm not doing anything because I have less than half an hour.

What can I possibly do in half an hour?

You know, I will revisit that statement, that idea.

No, it's.

Even if I have just 10 minutes, I'll open Bloody Unreal Engine, I'll open this for a second project and I will at least look at status at the current situation.

Maybe I won't do most meaningful work, but you know what?

At least I won't be idle.

I will be connected in some way.

I will keep context.

Maybe that's more accurate.

You know what?

I haven't been doing it and I kind of feel like this habit would help with things.

I've been probably wrecking my computer because I don't think it sounds very good.

I've been.

It was my previous setup.

I think I haven't been doing that much on this PC, but I would have Unreal Engine running nonstop and I would just be putting computer to sleep.

Yeah, I don't think this is good.

I feel like this is a recipe for disaster.

But in theory at least, this application should be running every day for either potentially realistic work, productive work, or just to keep context, just to remember where things are and what needs to be, needs to be done.

Okay, so I, I would like to thank to myself for this role because I remember it was very useful last year and I keep on doing that now.

Yeah, so for me, family life got in the way.

You know, I have a, I have a small daughter.

I mean she's getting bigger every year as kids do.

I think now for the first time, for the last year, I'm able to actually do something with her in the same room.

So before she would need my attention, every moment, like the longest stretch of time for me with her in the same space, uninterrupted amount of time was maximum is maybe 20 minutes.

And I feel like that was like a year and a half ago, two years ago for sure.

So this window of time when she gets to be occupied with herself is extending and I'm extremely grateful for that.

I love when she plays with Lego blocks at her desk and I'm just few meters away working on say Unreal Engine.

And we do play Legos as well.

And I kind of, yeah, I really like to do that with her.

But.

And yeah, I hate to be a dad that's glued to his computer.

You know, that's not what I want to be remembered for.

But yeah, another reason why I don't want to do a lot of work when she's around is I kind of need silence.

I need focus.

And as great as she is and as self occupied she gets, I really need certainty that no one will disturb me and I can just sit on this project till the night.

Yeah.

So I've been postponing those heavy tasks, focusing on lately on tasks that are just fun to do, you know, so tweaking that environment, working on garments for Unreal Engine little things, very visual.

Working with meshes, you know, And I'm reminding myself that, well, ultimately, this is what I want to do.

This is what makes me happy when I work on those things that I feel good with, you know, good about doing.

I feel creatively fulfilled.

But then there's this whole myriad of things like, you know, blueprints and.

And I guess screen capture.

Screen capture, no face mocap processes.

They are.

They.

They sound very fascinating to me.

But acting for the purpose of collecting that face performance data is a bit of a mess.

So I'm postponing those tasks.

And I'm often thinking, well, what if I just do what I love to do, models, environments.

I was really impressed with that statistic, and I shared with you my interpretation.

It's because people get those environments, they get characters, and they're done with this visual part.

Right.

They can run with that.

They have personally in the world, and now they can decide what to do with that person.

Well, so maybe it's not entirely a bad idea.

Maybe I should just focus on those things and see what happens.

I really want to stream my progress.

I want to make the progress, the end product.

So do many 3D design influencers, do they just stream their work?

Maybe it's client work.

Maybe it's something they do for fun, and the stream itself is the end product, and it's kind of cool.

And again, I'm talking to you about this and I'm getting excited about it again.

So at least for me, this podcast matters.

For me, this podcast makes sense for that reason.

Yeah, I want to talk to you also about vibe coding, because professionally, I don't work in 3D at all.

I would like to.

I mean, I guess I thought I want to, but I kind of feel like I want to do.

I want to keep this my own thing, you know, I don't want this to be my job.

Maybe I would like to sell it, like result of my work.

I want to maybe present it to my audience, but I don't want it to be my work because I think I will stop enjoying it.

In fact, I'm certain of that.

But I do work with 2D graphics.

I work as a UX UI designer and lately a company that I work for started to implement some workflows that rely heavily on AI and this was received with a lot of hesitance, hesitancy and distrust, I guess frustration because ultimately people are afraid that they will lose their jobs.

Right?

We're getting mixed results because we get a lot stuff done but equality suffers.

But just the fact that we have a lot of things done is very promising and I feel like there is just some fine tuning that remains to be done before the whole idea of bringing AI into coding pays off.

Now I feel like I was one of the few more successful in this trial.

We were using Claude mostly I would say and I feel like my work was the work that was least vibe coded at the least amount.

I feel like people were generating code like other co workers and just optimizing the code but kind of getting results from the prompt.

They were using skills and other guidelines to get code they needed.

I feel like I was the one who was interacting with AI in the most meaningful way because when I create user interface for a web app or for let's say for web app, because that's what it is mostly I kind of hate mobile apps, sorry.

I would create Mockup in Figma and Figma is just, it's an industry standard at this point.

Software, really great software to create UI for web apps, for apps, for anything dedicated UX design tool.

Okay, Now I can create this mock up with a great deal of fidelity and I can use a particular setup to feed this into AI into Corsor in this case.

Corsor is the sort of environment application for writing code.

It can manage large projects.

Yeah, it's kind of cool.

I don't really, I'm not a developer, I'm not a coder so I only skin the surface.

But AI helps a lot to get grasp and to get things done in course or even for someone like me.

So because I created this mock up, this visual mockup, what I want to happen and then I was saying to AI, hey, I would like this to happen and I want this animation and when I press this button I would like that screen to open and this screen is in Figma right here.

You know, I was giving specific guidelines to show specific content in a specific way and again there were animations, interactions, all that AI did it perfectly.

Okay.

Now my code has not yet been reviewed but I have a good feeling because I've been looking at the amount of lines of code.

I've been cleaning it with AI also.

I think it's really good quality products.

Now.

I've been thinking, this is exactly what I need for my Unreal Engine project.

I want to create the environment, I want to create characters.

I want to then say to AI what I want to happen.

You know, I want to name everything.

I want to create some abstract terms like this is a main square and main square ends with those little alleys here and there.

And pardon me, my throat is still killing me a little bit.

I want AI to fill in the gaps.

I want AI to write code for me.

And just what I experienced with creating a front end effectively, I would like to experience that in Unreal Engine.

And I know a assistant is coming to Unreal Engine sometime soon.

I feel like we have it now.

But it just gives advice and gives some high level overview.

But it's not writing any code.

We know it's coming.

We know it's coming.

There will be a time where you will be able to set up some meshes and prompt AI to create interactions, to create some logic, to to create certain behaviors.

You will not need to follow those tedious tutorials where you follow someone showing you something on the screen and you have no idea how this person is doing.

It really bugs me.

I look at those tutorials and I wonder, well, you're telling me to follow those steps.

Why won't you just give me the file that you work on here?

Just giving this blueprint in some way, I guess incentive for those people is they want to create video for ads and they want to grow their channel, blah blah blah like and subscribe.

But yeah, I feel like it'll be a lot better experience if we ask AI to create a specific blueprint as opposed to redoing it as someone shown on those online tutorials.

And don't get me started on how fast those videos go.

Like sometimes you need to really watch in slow speed and decipher what just happened.

I feel like they do it on purpose because when you watch tutorial there is maybe project that you can download but you need to pay on gumroad.

I get that.

But it's very dishonest method, isn't it?

And I hate that.

I hate that this is part of the world.

It seems like everyone just wants to get rich.

That's the main driver.

No, seriously, I told you, I work doing UX design.

I work for a podcast company, okay.

I've been into podcasting for since forever.

I love it as a medium.

I love it as a. I love it for its independent vibe.

You know, you can create podcasts.

No one can deplatform you.

Pretty much you.

No one is censoring you.

You just do audio, and this audio just gets to people.

Like, it's limited, but it's also very.

Okay, don't get me started on podcasting, because I don't want to digress, but basically, podcasts were really niche for so many years.

I would say, oh, I'm into podcasting.

What's the podcast?

What's the podcast?

Well, then serial came up, right?

Okay, look, I'm talking about podcasting.

I didn't want to do that.

What changed for podcasting was ads, and now everyone and your grandma does podcasting.

And it's not because everyone fell in love with the medium.

Everyone fell in love with it because now we can monetize it very well.

You can run ads if you have audience.

It's really easy to incorporate ads.

It just happens there are platforms that do it very well for you.

And yeah, it's a very nice experience, nice user experience to have that business.

Okay.

I feel like those YouTubers who give tutorials, they want to share knowledge, but their main incentive to do that is really earning money from ads.

And the same thing is happening with Unreal Engine.

People do want to make games, but they also want to monetize them.

They want career even before they learn the skill.

Have you noticed that there are people who want to get into this field?

And one of the first questions is, when will I be able to earn money with it?

The logic should be opposite.

Well, I'm in this because I love it.

And you know what?

I'll find a way to monetize this, because I feel like you can monetize anything.

If you get really deep into something, you can monetize it.

You can grab people's attention around doing this, and if you grab attention, you can monetize it.

If you get enough attention, and then it's just up to you.

So I feel like once we get vibe coding to be a part of Unreal Engine process, there will be a lot of monetization.

And I feel like it's gonna be a flood of games, a flood of experiences, 3D experiences.

There will be a lot of demand for models.

And, yeah, this can be generated with AI, but we know quality isn't good enough for anything dynamic.

I guess this may change, but who knows?

I feel like the 3D gaming market will explode with AI.

I mean, we already see how people.

How well people do with 2D games that you can wipe code in a browser.

Very simple, very easy to do.

You can create very simple games and just vibe code them in one afternoon.

The problem with 3D is that it's just a lot more complicated system.

But also there is not enough data to train AI on this stuff.

The reason why I've been asking myself this, why Face mocap is so well developed and why there are no reliable, inexpensive, cheap to run tools to run full body tracking.

And apparently it's because those models AI has been trained sufficiently based on face recognition software, face verification software.

We've got so many faces scanned, so many talking head videos that we can easily train those models on this.

We don't have enough data concerning or focusing on the entire body and therefore it's really hard to rely on AI understanding what it sees.

You get me?

Now I feel like we've got the same bottleneck with incorporation of coding AI into Unreal Engine.

I checked before making this recording.

There is not enough convincing reporting on Internet that says that someone connected Claude into Unreal Engine and they, you know, they created a nice bug free game very quickly.

It's just, it's just not working very well.

I wonder what it is.

I wonder what the reason is.

My guess is yeah, those models are not trained.

There's not enough data for AI to train on this.

But I look forward into this AI assistant tool in Unreal Engine.

I think it's going to be groundbreaking if not for education, then for.

Obviously I'm hoping for that so badly for creating blueprints in Unreal.

I mean maybe we don't need so much data to train those models.

Maybe just if there was documentation that AI can use then maybe that's all we need.

But oh wait, isn't this one of the biggest bottlenecks that we are experiencing right now?

EPIC is not really saying enough of documentation quite often.

It's out of date, they're lagging with, they're releasing features and they don't really document how to use this technology.

I kind of get idea why.

I get it.

Maybe AI will change things.

But yeah, I would say my guess is that we don't have documentation that we can use to train AI on how to do things.

So yeah, I'm very curious to see what this year will bring.

I've got great hopes for AI inside of Unreal Engine and if you have any feedback on this, any hints, maybe I'm missing important tool because I've seen some plugins that bring AI into Unreal.

But yeah, I Don't feel comfortable enough pulling the trigger and getting these.

But if you've tried, email me@simonkx xxmail.com Email is in the episode description.

Write to me.

I would love to.

I would love to know more about how that works and how to use it.

Okay, well, let's see what else we have here.

I've got a couple of post it notes here on my, on my screen by coding AI in Unreal World.

Well, I think I said everything I wanted to say and maybe I should keep it as that.

I feel like I digressed enough for this one episode.

Like I said, I haven't been doing much work.

I had good reasons not to.

What I can say is life is not linear.

We get to walk away sometimes and attend other things.

Just like there are different seasons in the year, there will be seasons that are seasons that are more productive and less productive.

Like, I'm convinced my productivity during winter is horrible.

And don't get me wrong, I love to stay late, I love to work through the night.

I love to be in that zone in the evening.

And it's amazing.

It's just so much better than working during the day.

But the problem is I suffer during the day.

Later, if I don't get eight hours of sleep, I'm shaking.

The day after, I'm feeling horrible.

And it takes me, you know, whole night and another day sometimes to work through it, to get back into my flow of sleep.

So I end up paying huge price from, for, for not sleeping enough.

And I do know that having a nap during the day would fix it.

But unfortunately I cannot, I cannot have a nap during the day.

And I would love to, you know, but yeah, it would fix something.

It would fix things.

I do have a feeling that my work situation will change this year.

You know, I'm kind of feeling that I need to follow my gut more, follow my passion, follow my destiny.

And I just don't want to be that drone in a company that basically slowly becomes an interface for AI.

I feel like with those AI tools we have reason to move away from doing simple things and we have to focus on bigger things.

It's not a matter of wanting, it's a matter of need.

What I mean by that is I had this conversation with my sister today and she's an artist, she's, she's a painter, but she studied graphic design, industrial design.

And she used to do, you know, logos, visual communication stuff.

And you know, her husband asked her to create logo for him.

She said, well, I don't really Even have tools for that right now?

I don't know.

No, just ask AI to do that.

I mean, very simple anecdote.

I know you can expect the outcome.

He got something.

It was crappy, but good enough.

And you know what?

I really feel like the reason to create logo is still there.

There's still need for good logo design.

I agree.

But for most of us, for most of projects out there, you can live with crappy logo.

And the designer that used to maybe specialize with logos, I would say should make a logo for himself, for herself and create a brand, create something bigger than just single entity that does logos.

You need to use that logo for yourself, use it as a skill to go beyond logo design.

Unless you love making logos, then stay with it, do logos and try to monetize.

Do you know what I mean?

It's now easier to step up your game and we kind of have to step up our game and it's kind of reason for me to get into Unreal Engine.

I see this as stepping up my game and I kind of feel like AI will democratize 3D work even more.

But maybe not to a crazy extent.

Maybe you still need to know Unreal Engine to do something and AI will be this gutsend that will remove all the friction and anyone will be able to create a game.

Look, maybe not for resale, maybe not for distribution.

There will be still game houses, there will be still people who do it professionally and their games are amazing.

But you will be able to do a game for yourself and act of making the game will be part of fun.

I believe that because when I work in Unreal Engine I'm having fun.

I'm having lots of fun.

And it's a reason for me to step away from gaming.

Because you know, I used to like world builder games or open world games and I realized I always spent all this time just playing, consuming this.

I realized that I have a lot more fun creating those worlds and owning them.

I will leave you with that.

I don't want to extend this episode forever.

We're already over 30 minutes.

I think it's good for my return.

I want to say that I will try to record sooner than this time, but I will not be dare to tell you about my progress.

I will be telling you about whatever came to mind when it comes to Unreal Engine.

I think I told you that before.

There is a lot of content around Unreal Engine.

A lot of very pragmatic content, but very little content about.

Just pure passion and pure excitement.

For me, this podcast, it gives me a reason to be accountable.

This podcast is my accountability partner.

I just had a couple of great realizations and this is worth price of admission, which is free, but it's still a lot for me.

I hope this was useful for you.

Feel free to write to me.

I love listener emails.

I love them.

This is one of the few reasons why I'm doing this.

I'm not on social media.

I want you to discover this podcast organically.

I want this podcast to be recommended to you and I want you to connect with me.

Write me an email.

Let's chat.

If I haven't responded to you yet, I will.

And yeah, I just want to say I really appreciate it.

So write me an email.

Email is in the show notes description.

Take care and I will speak to you soon, I promise.

I promise you that by.