IKEA 3D Models 🛋️, UE5 Cameras 🎥, ASCII Renderer 🧮
🚀 Fast Content & Smarter Workflows
Fill Your Blender Scenes Fast with This IKEA 3D Model Hack
A new IKEA 3D Model Downloader script by apinanaivot lets you grab GLB models of any IKEA product straight from its webpage. The tool adds a handy download button, works across all site languages, and auto-names files with product and color names for easy organization. While you can’t ship these models in games, they’re perfect for layout planning, mockups, and quick Blender scenes. The post also highlights the IKEA Browser Blender add-on and some fun IKEA/CAPTCHA web toys.
Your Unity Inspector Is a Disaster—Here’s How Odin Fixes It
On his third commercial game, Twisted Tower, this Unity dev admits his player controller inspector has become an unreadable monster—and uses Odin Inspector’s Visual Designer to tame it. He restructures everything with tabs, foldouts, box groups, titles, colors, and searchable inspectors, all without touching the script. Along the way he demos inline ScriptableObject editing, conditional visibility, and debug buttons like “Kill Player.” If your inspector chaos is killing motivation, this is a concrete, copyable cleanup plan.
🎥 Cinematics & Visual Polish
Dial In Your UE5 Cameras and Poses with Animation Layers
Learn how game animators use UE5 Animation Layers to keep shots flexible and non-destructive. The instructor breaks camera motion into a base layer plus dedicated shake layers, then uses weight sliders to turn shake off during slow motion or crank it up beyond 100% for intense impact. The same approach is applied to a robot character, isolating just a few controls in a “Robo Turn” layer for quick pose offsets without wrecking the original animation. You’ll also pick up tips for naming, managing, and debugging complex layer stacks.
Escaping Unreal ‘Tutorial Hell’: Epic’s 2026 Learning Roadmap
This Inside Unreal episode tackles “tutorial hell” head-on and lays out a clear strategy for learning Unreal Engine in 2026. Epic’s docs team walks through new structured learning tracks for programmers, designers, and artists, plus sample projects and a free Coursera certificate course. They show how to turn scattered tutorials into real projects, why fundamentals matter more than shortcuts, and how to stay motivated. The stream also updates viewers on hosting changes as Tina steps back to focus on her health.
🧠 Rendering Deep Dives
How I Built a Real-Time, Shape-Aware ASCII Renderer
Forget blurry, blocky ASCII filters: this deep dive shows how to render images and 3D scenes as crisp, high-contrast ASCII by embedding character shapes in high-dimensional space. Sampling circles inside each cell capture where each glyph is visually heavy, then nearest-neighbor matching picks the best character per tile. The author boosts edge readability with clever contrast operations that react to neighboring cells, then shoves the heavy lifting onto the GPU. It’s a great mix of graphics theory, math, and ruthless optimization.
Making a Block Game Fly on a Potato: My Software Depth Culling Journey
A solo dev building a Minecraft-like “Block Game” on integrated graphics walks through how they built a fully CPU-side depth-based occlusion culling system. By rendering a 256×128 software depth buffer and using multi-level subchunks as occluders, they cut occlusion work from 150–200ms down to about 4ms. The post details each optimization step—cheap transforms, proper frustum culling, visible-face detection, and subchunk mipmaps—and shows real-world gains of 50–95% chunk culling. Limitations and ideas for future improvements round out a highly practical rendering deep dive.