I am working on a character model I might like to sell on the unity asset store. I found a free humanoid basemesh online published under the CC0 license. I plan to maintain the overall structure and proportions of the basemesh while reducing the poly count by about two thirds. I will then rig and animate it, and add several clothing/armour sets and several hair/facial hair styles. I imagine that by the time I am finished the character’s face and overall proportions will look quite similar to the original basemesh but will have a great deal of additional work put in by me.
The asset store submission guidlines state the following:
1.1.b The submission does not directly recreate a popular game’s design, art style or aesthetic, and is not a compilation of found content/products with no significant added value from the publisher. The submission is also not the direct result of public tutorials.
So my question is, what constitutes “significant added value”. Would my planned asset be acceptible?
You can even include that CC0 humanoid mesh as is. You just can‘t make your asset comprise only of that mesh. You are more likely to get the „asset is too simple“ rejection in such a case.
Rigging and animating is significant value added IMO. But keep that „too simple“ in mind. Just a humanoid with a couple variations/accessories may not be enough. Check the forum for „asset is too simple“ to see some examples.
Also check the asset store to get a feel for what others have made, specifically look at assets released in the past two years (older assets may no longer be accepted due to raised minimum standards) and what content they offer (single vs multiple, customization options, animations, overall quality etc.) and whether there are many single humanoid character assets (means: market is saturated and new entries may have to add significant value) and lastly whether your character can be combined well with other art asset packs, mainly art style,use cases and scale.