EZ-Tree Generator 🌳, UE5 Foliage 🎮, Art protection 🛡️
🌳 Art & Environment Creation
EZ-Tree: Free Procedural Tree Generator with 50+ Customization Options
EZ-Tree is a new open-source procedural tree generator from Dan Greenheck designed for creators tired of paying for decent foliage assets. With 50+ adjustable parameters, you can shape everything from branch structure to leaf style, then export directly as GLB or PNG for your game or 3D project. The tool builds on a previous Three.js prototype and is available via an online demo, making it a fast, free way to grow a custom forest.
Super-Dense Foliage in UE5.7: Nanite Assemblies with USD
Nanite Assemblies are the backbone of Unreal Engine 5.7’s new Nanite Foliage, enabling fast rendering of fully modeled vegetation by heavily reusing instanced geometry. Epic outlines how to represent these assemblies in USD, introducing custom schemas for roots, external mesh references, and skeletal joint bindings. The guide walks through minimal static setups, PointInstancer-based scattering, and more complex skeletal assemblies tied to a base SkelRoot. It’s the foundation for building robust DCC-to-UE pipelines, with Houdini-focused tutorials coming in Part 2.
🛡️ Protecting & Publishing Your Work
IAMAG Tools: All‑In‑One Hub to Protect and Publish Your Art
IAMAG is turning its pro concept-art community toolkit into a standalone platform for all creators. The web-based suite streamlines polishing, smart social media cropping, and reel creation, while also protecting your work with invisible anti-AI noise, DMCA tools, and certificates of authenticity. A moodboard search engine filters out AI-generated references, and a reverse image search helps you find and act on art theft with auto-generated DMCA letters. The Kickstarter is already funded, and you can try the tools free for 48 hours.
PC vs Console Culture: Why So Many Indies Misread Steam
Using a 1993 Computer Gaming World poll, this piece shows how today’s “hot new” Steam genres are really evolutions of long-standing PC staples: strategy, sim, crafty-buildy and horror. The author argues many indie flops come from console-first devs misreading Steam’s PC-native culture, which loves complexity, dense UIs, and keyboard/mouse play. NSFW content, “too many games,” hardcore setups and strong horror have all been around for decades. The real change is finer-grained subgenres, not a different audience.
📱 Games, Growth & Monetisation
Why Hybrid Monetisation Is Taking Over Mobile Games by 2026
Hybrid monetisation is replacing the old “IAP vs IAA” debate, letting studios earn from both paying and non-paying players. Many teams now use ads as a soft-launch layer to test retention, creatives, and UA before committing to deep economy design. The article covers ad mix strategy, the shift from hypercasual to “hybrid casual,” and the importance of that first high-eCPM ad view. It closes by pitching GeeMee’s AI-powered ad platform for optimising hybrid revenue without hurting UX.
How Superluminal Sorts 20+ GiB Profiles Without Killing RAM
Superluminal’s team shares how they sort enormous profiling captures—20+ GiB and up to 80,000 threads—without blowing memory or tanking framerate. Because OS- and eBPF-based data collection can’t guarantee globally ordered timestamps, they treat the raw event stream as “mostly sorted” and design a custom merge-like algorithm around that fact. By storing per-chunk minimum timestamps in a simple sorted table, loading only the next-needed chunks, and prefetching/decompressing on a worker thread, they make global sorting nearly free. They also outline a future hybrid approach that falls back to classic k-way merge for pathological cases.