After doing some reading I’ve concluded that an artist working on a Unity project would need a complete license to build levels and/or tweak their assets within the engine.
i.e. Every lighting artist is going to need their own license of Pro, Asset Server iPhone Advanced, for around $3,500 USD?
And this would also be the case for all artists who need access to level design and creation tools, with the exception of modelling and texturing artists. Even then, there’s going to need to be some texturing artists with access so they can control the quality of their shaders/materials etc?
Can someone confirm for me that this is correct or not?
I’ve searched the forums and google and couldn’t find a straight answer to this question so thanks for helping me out.
Depending on how many people you have who really need access thats right.
Althought the art integration could be handled by a single person so mainly your programmers, the world designers and the art manager would require a license.
Generally: Every developer, independent if programmer or artist, working with Unity requires his/her own license.
iPhone Advanced is only required if you intend to work on iPhone projects and require advanced naturally.
What I can’t comment on is if there are bundle licenses for larger numbers of developers. You might want to drop Unity Tech a mail on that or contact HiggyB
Right now on one of our projects, our artist is not using Unity. He sends all assets to the project manager.
I (as a programmer) use Unity, though honestly I wouldn’t need to. I could hand my scripts to the project manager, especially if the entire team was on a budget and we needed to save a few thousand dollars.
So we could get away with one license, one installation, one person actually using Unity out of three.
Are there any external or 3rd party level/world editors that allow you to build an area and then preview it with the Unity engine, or is this also not possible?
We’re actually a small group but we all come from professional 3D backgrounds and are horrid perfectionists. We each want to be able to see our work and tweak it for best effect.
That’s almost the point of us engaging in this as a side project from the usual work.
I guess in the end we’d really prefer to avoid an additional $17,500 on licenses for something that’s not a cost in most (all?) other engines we’ve looked at. It’s frustrating.
I’m not suggesting other engines are over-all better value than Unity. I’m just being critical of one feature.
To summarise this criticism:
Other engines don’t seem to charge for a map editor that an artist can use to check their assets out within the game engine. If you feel this is a significantly untrue statement then please correct me.
I further believe that even many, if not most, distributed 3D games also offer the ability for an artist to check their assets out within the game engine for no cost other than the game itself.
That is the basis for the assumption on this feature usually having little (or no) cost associated with it.
We agree that your product is a very compelling offering and that it’s very, very competitive for its cost.
That we are left with the option to pay $3,500 per artist, or shuffle around builds all day for approval, is frustrating and detracts from the goodness.
Do you think either of these opinions are untrue or unfair?
