My patreon tutorial series about real time tech art using Unreal Engine

Obscura

As some of you may have noticed, I have started a patreon page where I plan to make tutorial series of different topics. The first one is already started, and its about hlsl in Unreal Engine. This series is for people who just gets started with the topic. Basic node based material knowledge is enough to join, because we go from the ground up. I also made a thread for that series here, and my plan is to make one for each series, plus this one as a "table of content", and a place for announcements. Moderators, feel free to merge these if you feel like its too much separation, but I think the nature of the topics justifies the separation between them.

This is the patreon page:
https://www.patreon.com/kristoflovas

And this is the link to the first post of the hlsl series:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/hlsl-tutorials-1-38233655
Teaser of part2:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/about-next-parts-38276585

There is one public post at the moment, and its asking about what you would want to see, other than graphics coding,  with some ideas included. I tried to make a versatile collection of topics.
Thank you for taking a look.

Its worth mentioning that most if not all tutorials will be for patrons only! But you don't need to be in any of the tiers if you only want the tutorials.Any support grants access to them.
You can also support me there with any amount of $ if you feel like I'm a helpful person here, or if I helped you with something in the past, and you want to appreciate it. Thanks again.

Table of content so far:

1. Hlsl in Unreal Engine (10 chapters planned, patrons only) 
1.1 https://www.patreon.com/posts/hlsl-tutorials-1-38233655

2. Face weighted vertex normals tutorial (redirects to the polycount thread, free) https://www.patreon.com/posts/my-older-writeup-38702416
3. Stylized foliage shading (redirects to the polycount thread, free) https://www.patreon.com/posts/about-stylized-38702521
4. Self shadowing volumetric fog in Unreal Engine (patrons only) https://www.patreon.com/posts/sample-code-for-38702950
5. Sample project for modeling cloudy shapes and baking them into a volume texture (public post, free) https://www.patreon.com/posts/40513937

Obscura

A few other thoughts:
As the audience grows, the quantity and the quality of my posts will increase.
But lets be honest, nobody will make a bunch of things for a few subscribers. Time is money, and in that case, I can find some better usage for my free time, that actually takes me somewhere. 
I will keep helping people here, but the more detailed explanations and tutorials will most likely be moved to the patreon page in the future. 
I am working in a fairly successful studio (at least with hungarian standards, where I live). I also make acceptable amount of money there, and I don't necessarily need to make more money out of other people to make my living. However, if I want to accomplish my near future plans (say buying a house, a car,  or starting an indie studio or an edicational project), what I make is not enough and I would never be able to reach my goals, so I'm starting to try out some other routes too. One of the reasons for this is that I have some very bad family background, and I don't have any help from there, I never had, but this is not really a topic to discuss here. I don't think this whole thing and thought is wrong. I see that there are a lot of people who thinks that everything is should be free, but they don't think about that making the content takes time, energy, effort, and sometimes even money. Some people can afford giving everything for free, but unfortunately I can't, if I want myself to live better later.
Don't misunderstand me, I don't expect this move to absolutely change my state, but anything helps.
Thats it.

pior

Heya - are you aware that your content is locked at this time ? (this is a genuine question).



As good as the content may be, the audience has to grow from somewhere ...

Obscura

Like I mentioned, most of the posts are for patrons only. Any amount of $ unlocks it. No need to buy tiers. There will be some free posts too, but full tutorial series will be for money. Again, any amount of support unlocks them.

Obscura

I believe that if reference images can be sold for $, tutorials are fine to be sold for money too. The plan is to make them for less experienced ppl, so some of them may not suite your needs, but as it was mentioned in the first posts, I'm very much open for suggestions about what you guys would like to see. And if I get enough of these, there may be some series of more advanced topics too.

Obscura

If you have any suggestions on how to get more people being engaged, I'd highly appreciate it! But I will not unlock all posts just so people can see whats inside, because then the whole purpose is beaten and nobody will pay anything.

Alex_J

patreon isn't on your signature here.

i dont have time for the actual tutorials but i make a small donation cause i learned a lot from your post here on polycount.

not a huge tip but i picked up a lot of followers for my games from posting on reddit and imgur. It's a different subject but maybe if you are showing cool videos of what can be accomplished fairly regularly you might attract some newcomers.

Tech art is really intimidating though    good luck!

Obscura

Thats very nice from you, anything helps, thank you! I'm planning to make some promo video or some sort of that very soon. Also thanks for the suggestion with the signature, I actually forgot about that. I'm just starting this, and I need to get into it more deeply if I want it to go anywhere, thats for sure.Thanks again.

guitarguy00

Obscura said:

A few other thoughts:
As the audience grows, the quantity and the quality of my posts will increase.
But lets be honest, nobody will make a bunch of things for a few subscribers. Time is money, and in that case, I can find some better usage for my free time, that actually takes me somewhere. 
I will keep helping people here, but the more detailed explanations and tutorials will most likely be moved to the patreon page in the future. 
I am working in a fairly successful studio (at least with hungarian standards, where I live). I also make acceptable amount of money there, and I don't necessarily need to make more money out of other people to make my living. However, if I want to accomplish my near future plans (say buying a house, a car,  or starting an indie studio or an edicational project), what I make is not enough and I would never be able to reach my goals, so I'm starting to try out some other routes too. One of the reasons for this is that I have some very bad family background, and I don't have any help from there, I never had, but this is not really a topic to discuss here. I don't think this whole thing and thought is wrong. I see that there are a lot of people who thinks that everything is should be free, but they don't think about that making the content takes time, energy, effort, and sometimes even money. Some people can afford giving everything for free, but unfortunately I can't, if I want myself to live better later.
Don't misunderstand me, I don't expect this move to absolutely change my state, but anything helps.
Thats it.

That's totally fine, no one expects quality material for free. Some artists do that and that is great, but it is not an obligation. 

One suggestion I can make is maybe put out one series for free that is fairly comprehensive in order to drive people towards your patreon options. Tim Bergholz does this with great success. But it is up to you. I wish you the best 

Obscura

I'll consider that. Or at  least making 1-2 chapters free. Thanks. Actually there are a lot of people who would expect things to be free. I get a lot of comments like "show the setup" or "make a tutorial" and when I actually do it and put it out for money, those people doesn't bother buying it. I know I can just ignore those.

KurtR

The tutorial culture has become bad. So many bad tutorials being put out these days where teaching isn't in the creators interest, the money is, and some of these teachers have minimal knowledge in the first place. Udemy and Skillshare are full of them. I also recall Allan McCay talking about experienced artists often saying "Oh, its just a tutorial piece I am working on," and putting minimal work into actually teaching, skipping details and overall just making it harder for new artists.

Teaching really needs to become an art again. And I do agree, put the teasers on youtube, or a chapter or two as you suggested. I might be interested if I know more about what it is you are teaching. Working on something now where I do need to up my technical artistic side.

Obscura

Hi @KurtR . Thanks for the advice, and I can agree, a lot of tutorials don't tell much. Currently I'm working on a hlsl coding tutorial series for Unreal Engine, not sure how useful is that for you.If it isn't, don't pay in Although there will be different series later. I posed some ideations about the possible topics on the patreon page. Thats a post that non - patrons can see too. Let me know which one interests you. Or if you have anything else in mind, you can tell that too and we will see about it. If more people requests the same topic, maybe it will be the next one. A promo video is in progress, and I'll make some posts free to access soon as well. I just need a little bit more content first.

jStins

I really enjoy all of your posts here Kristof. I always learn a little something even though I don't use Unreal these days. I don't know that an ongoing subscription makes sense for me, but happy to chip in a little something. Regarding building a following on Patreon... You could probably repackage some of your posts here as little freebies. Like polish some of the text and images from your comments in this thread, include a shader or two and offer that for free.

Have you thought about authoring tools and selling them on the Unreal Marketplace? Like I said, I'm not using Unreal these days and don't know what Unreal users need. Seems someone with your skillset could author something the Unreal community would want and sell well. 

Thanks for all the knowledge you've shared for free here and good luck in monetizing your efforts. 

Obscura

Thats a good idea, thank you!

If you are not using Unreal Engine, 90% of my patreon posts wouldn't be useful for you. I know I'm talking against myself but I don't want people to be disappointed so in that case, don't pay.

But I really like your suggestion with the (originally) polycount freebies so some of those may appear on my patreon soon. Still, the rest of the posts will be Unreal related. At least the paid ones for now. We will see about other type of content later.

Obscura

Added 3 new posts. 2 of them redirects to a polycount thread and are free posts (thanks @jStins ). The third one is about self shadowing volumetric fog. 

1. Face weighted normals: https://www.patreon.com/posts/my-older-writeup-38702416
2. Stylized foliage shading: https://www.patreon.com/posts/about-stylized-38702521
3. Self shadowing volumetric fog sample code for UE4: https://www.patreon.com/posts/sample-code-for-38702950

Obscura

I uploaded a sample UE4 project of baking unlimited amount of cloudy shapes into a single volume texture. It can be useful for making and baking down complex volumes. Its a bit limited currently, but the intention was to create only cloudy shapes. This is a public post, so anyone can download the project to try it.

Link:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/40513937

Obscura

I uploaded the source files of how to sample MagicaVoxel assets as volume textures in Unreal. The included shader is very basic and only intended to show the texture sampler setup, and does not do full shading, and the tracer is basic too. Use the texture sampler function in your custom ray marcher. Inside MagicaVoxel, just export your content as "slice". This will create a vertical volume texture layout, which the sampler takes and lays out properly  after taking 3d coordinates. It has to be mentioned that this volume layout has some obvious texture size limitations, as MagicaVoxel lays out the slices below each other, so you quickly get to K-s of pixels. Depending on the other 2 axes, your z resolution may be moderately limited. I'll try to contact the creator and ask him if ther would be way to use a more efficienty packed layout.

Link:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/magicavoxel-for-42063330