Christopher Cherubini

As a freelance rigger, I need to make sure my builds have a lot of flexibility. So I've recently reworked my lid modules to add variable joint counts. By utilizing a curve-based output I can changed the amount of joints used based on the needs of the project. Higher joint counts for fidelity and control, lower counts for simplicity and optimization. Or I can test and iterate to find a happy middle ground. So animators using my rigs on film or game projects can enjoy the same features, such as: - Automated lid follow with eye movement - Main controls to position the lids through translation and sculpt the curvature with rotation/scale  - Secondary controls for finer detail (If there are enough joints to support it) - Manual or automated blinking. Animate controls, or activate the automated meet point between your posed lids for a perfect seal I've been using iterations of this system over my last few projects, both commercials and games. The core elements of this system have been floating around in my head since 2018, so it's been great to finally put it to the test. 

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🎉 Two New Career Resources Just Landed on Our Community Site - With Huge Thanks to Scott Millard and Tim C.! https://lnkd.in/d3z__2sV If you’ve ever wanted to understand how video game publishing actually works - not the surface-level stuff, but real, on-the-ground global strategy - you now have one of the best free guides in the world, permanently, thanks to Scott Millard. Scott is a veteran industry leader, best known for his time as Managing Director of Bandai Namco Southeast Asia and Korea. He helped launch Tekken, Dragon Ball Z, and even brought Skyrim to market in the region. His publishing knowledge spans regions, formats, and decades - and he’s gifted our community his Guide to Video Game Publishing for all to access at Amir Satvat's Games Community. Also, I’m thrilled to welcome Tim Cullings as a contributor - someone I’ve admired for years. You may know Tim from his leadership at Global Game Jam, Seattle Indies, or his earlier work with Oculus VR and in engineering. He’s kicked things off by sharing a curated list of top game dev events and jams - something many have requested. But this is just an amuse bouche. Tim has big ideas, and we’re excited to build this space with him and for him. We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear - you want more Tim in the community, and so do we. 🔹 In sharing these, I also want to recognize the 20 amazing individual contributors behind the career resources on our site, in addition to our Discord moderators and 2,400+ community coaches. I’m proud to say that 10 of the 20 are female - 50%, which is double industry gender representation. And we’re equally proud of the diversity across many other dimensions, which we take seriously in every aspect of our work. Here they are - please join me in thanking them: • Sarah Thomson (Mentorship Guide) • Alex Gombos (Interview Guide) • Jasmine Coppin (Art Portfolio Review Guide) • Hailey Rojas (#OpenToNetwork) • Mayank Grover (New Games Roles Partnership) • Eva Tucker (Support Your Indies) • Alexander Rehm (MVP Resources) • Johnathan Vance (Indie Marketing Guide) • Aïda Figuerola (Early Career Guide Lead) • Ali Farha (Early Career Guide Lead) • Chris Mayne (Games Art Resources) • Seth S. (Guide To Games Startups) • Corey Neuman (Homelessness Resources) • Michelle Fuzari (Mental Health Resources) • Jessica Lindl (Career Resources Suite) • Renee Gittins (Game Dev Foundry - External Resource Partnership) • Lex Parisi (Ask Lex Career Questions) • Tim W. (LinkedIn Premium Trials Resource Ownership) • Tim C. (Events And Jams; And More To Come) • Scott Millard (Guide To Video Game Publishing) • Thank you also to Fitzgerald Lewis, Tim Wood, Will Morgan, Max Bowser, Alex Gombos, and Michelle Voillot for their contributions to the Early Career Guide 💙 Never forget - this is a total team project of 10,000+ lifetime contributors. "We Help Gamers Get Hired. Zero Profit, Infinite Caring."

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🧮 De-mystifying the Pixel Processor in Substance Designer Chapter 2: Grid Generation Recreating a grid like the Tile Generator can do inside the Pixel Processor is a great practice to understand fundamentals of image processing. By scaling your UVs and taking the fractional part, you repeat a pattern across the surface. Then, by centering and stepping the result, you get a clean, evenly spaced grid, fully controllable in both X and Y. 🧱 Horizontal? Vertical? Brick layout? No problem. However how to get there with different shapes is going to be a different chapter. #madewithsubstance #substance3d #substancedesigner #pixelprocessor

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Games aren’t just about mechanics. They’re about emotions. Here’s how to design games that evoke emotions: 🎮 𝗚𝗔𝗠𝗘𝗣𝗟𝗔𝗬   • Systems: Mechanics, core loop, difficulty • Emotions: Fun, curiosity, and mastery 📈 𝗣𝗥𝗢𝗚𝗥𝗘𝗦𝗦𝗜𝗢𝗡 • Systems: Unlocks, skill trees, rewards • Emotions: Anticipation, joy, and the drive to push forward 🎨 𝗔𝗥𝗧 & 𝗗𝗘𝗦𝗜𝗚𝗡 • Systems: Cohesive style, animations, characters • Emotions: Immersion, exploration, and game feel 🖥 𝗨𝗜 & 𝗨𝗫 • Systems: Screens, user flow, icons • Emotions: Intuitive understanding and smooth navigation 📚 𝗧𝗨𝗧𝗢𝗥𝗜𝗔𝗟𝗦 • Systems: Soft & hard tutorials, visual hints • Emotions: Competence and those satisfying “aha” moments 💰 𝗠𝗢𝗡𝗘𝗧𝗜𝗭𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡 • Systems: Offers, ads, in-game currency • Emotions: Balancing "pain" with fairness and value  𝗟𝗜𝗩𝗘 𝗢𝗣𝗦 • Systems: Events, leaderboards, challenges • Emotions: FOMO, excitement, and social engagement Don’t just build game systems.   Build experiences players will feel.  

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🎉 Jellyfish AI Impact now supports Windsurf, a leader in AI-powered coding solutions, offering tools like the Windsurf Editor that blend collaborative, continuous AI assistance with developers' workflows. Together, Windsurf and Jellyfish are changing how AI and humans work together.  Through our robust integration with Windsurf, Jellyfish AI Impact allows joint customers to:  🤖 Measure Windsurf’s impact on overall developer productivity: Analyze how Windsurf solutions like Windsurf Editor impact different engineering workflows and use cases – whether it's building new features, reducing technical debt, or reviewing for code quality and security improvements. 📈 Scale Windsurf adoption across the organization: Identify teams with high engagement to further accelerate development, automate testing, and streamline deployment, then replicate these best practices and implementation strategies company-wide. Learn more about what this integration means for your engineering organization here: https://lnkd.in/ghNguE47

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CDPR plan to release The Witcher 4, 5, and 6 within a six year period using Unreal Engine. Another RPG that did this in the past? Biowares Mass Effect. Those with a birth year that starts with a 19 may recall what BioWare accomplished with the original Mass Effect trilogy. 3 Mass Effect were built and shipped within one console generation, powered by Unreal Engine 3, and supported by a production pipeline that was battle tested. That trilogy became a model for narrative continuity in AAA games because each entry arrived quickly enough for players to stay attached to the characters, the world, and the evolving choices that defined the saga. CD Projekt Red looks to chsae a similar rhythm. By shifting to Unreal Engine 5, the studio is trying to avoid the technical complications that slowed development on Cyberpunk and to create a shared foundation for multiple teams working on overlapping projects. The Witcher 4 has already been in development for four years, and CDPR has said it will not release before 2027. This framing positions the trilogy plan not as a hype statement but as a structured production approach that depends on a common engine, shared assets, and predictable pipelines. If the studio hits its plan, players could receive a new Witcher entry every three years. For Mass Effect, players never drifted away from the experience, and each new game extended the momentum of the last. Systems improved without losing their identity, and the narrative carried emotional weight because it never disappeared from the cultural conversation. CD Projekt Red could be aiming for the same effect. A steady three year cycle would let the next Witcher saga evolve in a connected way while keeping fan investment high. CDPRs ambition places them directly alongside one of the most respected production feats in modern gaming history.

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Following up on my previous post about using Modular Rig for simple environment animation, but this time focusing on a mechanical prop. This prop uses slightly more complex module than the previous one, and the results were honestly a bit surprising (in a good way). ➤ What worked well ✅ Moving beyond single-joint motion is doable, as long as the prop parts are spitted with animation in mind. ✅ Building a skeleton and painting skin weights directly in Unreal works well for this prop, which has a moderate complexity. ✅ Mechanical modules like Hinge and Piston are already well supported out of the box and easy to reason about. ➤ Where friction shows up ⚠️ This still isn’t a full DCC replacement. The quality of the result depends heavily on how well the asset is designed and segmented upfront. ➤ Bigger takeaway For me, this reinforced that Modular Rig lowers the barrier to keeping work entirely in-engine and expands what environment art and level design can include, especially for smaller projects where DCC round-trips aren’t available or are too costly. On top of that, it could potentially enable iteration to happen directly in the level. Still exploring, but I’m curious how others are thinking about where this kind of workflow fits into their pipelines. 🤔 #UnrealEngine #UE5 #TechnicalAnimation #GameDev #TechnicalArt #LevelDesign #ControlRig #AnimationPipeline

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There’s a lot of disinformation around what Unreal Engine 5 is capable of. Most people blame the engine for poor performance, when in reality, the defaults are tuned for visual fidelity, not efficiency. When an Unreal game runs badly, people like to blame the engine. When Valorant runs flawlessly on any hardware, no one credits Unreal. The truth is, the engine reflects the developer’s choices, not its own limits. Unreal has been around for nearly 30 years. It was one of the first mainstream 3D engines and has evolved through every generation of hardware. It was also the first major game engine to run on iOS. Contrary to popular belief, much of its legacy code and pipelines have actually become faster, not slower. The same Unreal Engine 3 titles that once pushed PCs to their limits now run effortlessly on low-end hardware, proving how much untapped potential the engine has always had. That same headroom still exists today, if you know how to trim the fat and understand what’s under the hood. I previously wrote a post showing how to aggressively claw back up to 20x performance: https://lnkd.in/eDMFUc-k If you prefer a more conservative, feature-retaining approach, check out Quod Soler’s excellent write-up: https://lnkd.in/eap5HHae #unrealengine #gamedev #unreal #optimization #ue5 #ue4 #epicgames #valorant #performance

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Unreal Engine's Control Rig provides a TimeOffset functionality that allows for delaying animations. This can be exploited for creative expression, potentially enabling the automatic generation of smear frame effects. #UE5 #UE5Study

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⁉️ Need help creating Rock Cliffs in Substance Designer? So did I, but gon joy shared this with me! By using different cell patterns, we can create the core of our process. 💡 One must have a small tilling with big shapes being our main pattern, while the other one should get the smallest pieces. Then it is time to use a Min Mode over our main pattern to create organic variation. However, the secret comes with the Non-Uniform Directional Warp. This node allows us to extend the shape, leaving a trace. And creating a 3D Shape! Did you know this technique❓ #3d #vfx #texturing #TextureArtist #3dtexturing #digitalartist #substance3ddesigner #3dartist #gameartist #gameart #adobe

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Launched a new unreal engine editor tool on fab today to generate landscape-conforming geometry on the fly. 🚀 More info: https://lnkd.in/eFkyUpns

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𝗣𝗵𝘆𝘀𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗨𝗻𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝘃𝘀 𝗨𝗻𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹 works differently than you might expect. Unity and Unreal both simulate physics, but with fundamentally different architectures: 𝗜𝗻 𝗨𝗻𝗶𝘁𝘆: Adding a Rigidbody immediately activates physics simulation 𝗜𝗻 𝗨𝗻𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹: Objects remain static until you EXPLICITLY enable simulation 📩 Get all Unity2Unreal Guides and other game dev resources weekly: https://lnkd.in/g7hyF39c You'll get resources like: Unity2Unreal Guide, Unity & Unreal Cheat Sheets, Hacks, Game Breakdowns, Roadmaps, Project Ideas, and more. This architectural difference trips up EVERY Unity developer moving to Unreal. Your meshes sit lifeless because you forgot to call SetSimulatePhysics(true). Key translations: • Unity's Rigidbody → Unreal's UPrimitiveComponent with simulation enabled • AddForce() exists in both but needs different vector types • Unity's impulse/force modes → Unreal's separate AddForce/AddImpulse methods • Unity's damping properties → Unreal's SetLinearDamping/SetAngularDamping 💡 Pro tip: In Unreal, check simulation in the Details panel during prototyping, then write the C++ later! *** Mayank Grover, Mridul Agrawal, Aryan Saxena #games #gamedev #cpp #unity #unrealengine 

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Using this simple node setup, we can create a tiling pattern in Unreal Engine materials. All we need are a Texture Coordinate node, a Multiply node, and a Frac node. Connecting it to the UVs input of any shape will result in creating a pattern.

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