Check it! It’s a site that I randomly came across while searching the internet (for a 3D Model of Stephano from Amnesia. Pewdiepie. Lol. XD) It looks pretty well organized, and looks to have quite a bit of models.
I’ve also added a couple of other free 3D Model Websites with quality models for your game!
Oops. Sorry about that. I just joined to ask a question, and then I posted this. I assure you that I’m not an advertisement. XD Just making a game in my free time, and thought I might share the website I came across before I forgot about it.
It’s good to see free models, but every single one on the first page is under copyright. Unless anybody can license the characters or even real vehicles and weapons, the site isn’t very useful for a game.
Its useful for placeholders, you know when your getting the mechanics of your game working before you invest time or cash into models that might not work out if you change how your game works or even scrap it as its not fun to play use some of these so you have something to interact with and populate your scenes with. If everything goes ok replace them with your own ones.
You know what’s both useful and legal for placeholders? Boxes. There’s no need to take stuff from other games. If you can’t make the game good with boxes, then you’ll never make it good with flashy graphics either.
It’s even considered a bad idea to have good looking graphics at that stage because it interferes with judging if the game is fun and you’re tempted to keep the temporary assets if they look good.
It’s all around better to just steer clear of that mess.
A few months ago I suggested to them that they get some clear licensing labels on the model pages, so we could know what’s copyrighted, what’s under CC-0, CC-BY and the like as is done by sites such as Blendswap, making the models more useful for their intended purposes.
The suggestion got deleted immediately.
I wouldn’t go the route of ‘free’ (or even paying) models for important final components like player characters and other game-specific props; they should be custom-tailored for your game, as any good trademark is. However for background filler and generic objects it can certainly be a time saver to use existing models with the proper license.
I don’t expect that site to stay around too long once publishers catch on to it. They don’t usually care so much if people rip the models themselves, but when you start distributing them that’s another issue. None of them are ‘legal’ to use - so best to stay clear.
And wccrawford is correct - a box is all you need for a temp asset.
Well I got rid of the description and added some new websites. Some of them have already been shared, but might as well share the ones that haven’t. Or for people who haven’t seen them.