I’ve realized I’d rather buy a lot of art assets to finish a game. But at the same time I would like to buy universal assets that could be used for any type of game and if i had to I could just re-texture them. To make a decent looking game lets say an FPS for now. About how much money would it cost to buy all the art assets for a finished game. I know this is a vague question. But how would I go about creating this list for owning assets that can be used in a bunch of different types of games. What are the bare basic models you need for any game. I would need to buy animations, characters, props ( some i could reuse and pretend they are something else), vehicles, level assets. Could you do this on a reasonable budget. Like $2000 or less? Sorry again this is a vague question I can’t really think of how to reword it. Maybe you guys can help.
Also would asset packs be a good start, if so can you link some?
Depends TOTALLY on your game design, and this can flit from project to project. I’m a bit trigger happy with assets that look fancy so i have an answer for every occasion, but if you’re going for the regular ‘fill a landscape’ stock you can get loads of cheap stuff on the store, check out this guy Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making he makes beautiful, cleverly created stuff to allow usage of it in many situations. The apocalypse thing is on sale right now! Go grab it!
I have on the other hand bout £200 of what are essentially little bits of robot from the kitbash thing created to as a demo/experiment i thinkhttp://www.bulgarov.com/
For knocking stuff up quickly if technical looking, kitbashing is the way to go at the moment, modo’s got a big kitbash set, there’s stuff on google 3d warehouse and i found a funky convertor that turns sketchup models from garbage into lovely things. Going to be particularly useful when Quixels new tools come out and if you ever get handy with Z-Brush, or possibly Modo too
Ive always wanted to learn kitbashing but never knew how. Any info on it? Also the point of me now deciding to pay is because I don’t want to MAKE a lot of art anymore, its just too time consuming, I’m not really good at art and you need a bazillion models for games…
Kitbashing is a very old term for making your own custom figurines from different kits, but in a 3D sense it’s assembling a bunch of models to create a larger model. Some of these might simply slot over or into, but some might mean actually merging into another object. In ZBrush and i’m quite sure Mudbox too, and Modo and some other, offer the ability to do this quite nicely - zbrush is a good example because it would let you combine whatever you wanted and maintain an even mesh around your objects - you pretty much add your robot bits as z-tools and get bashing! You can obviously use ZBrushes excellent sculting tools at the same time. I’m not starting on the kitbashing until Quixels new tools come out, they look amazing and will make kitbashing a lot of fun and the idea is - Make sure your model is UVW mapped (ZBrush has great tools for this too) Try gather the elements of your model into sensible looking forms (That can be described by one material) colour them appropriately based on Quixel’s guide for material types, load your coloured map you got from laying your UVs flat in ZBrush and grabbing them into photoshop, load the upcoming Quixel tools’ dDo and load your model into 3Do. Relearn, or discover, the joys of modern tools
Which brings me to another point - if you intend to work with a Physically Based workflow, you’ll need to probably create some extra, suitable maps for the objects in your scene if they were made before this pbr stuff caught on, Unity 5 will be very PBR based i’d imagine so it’s good stuff to learn
But just as a teaser as to maybe why you could try modelling stuff kitbash style and get amazing results, fast, here:
Pick a game you want to emulate. Let’s say Brink: http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/brink/credits
Count the number of people working on the game. Take a guess at an average salary, let’s say $60,000 per year.
$2,000 would be enough to hire a modeller for about a week and a half. You’d probably get five props out of them in that time.
Or, another style. Vlambeer’s Gun Godz.
Two guys (one of them a programmer), part-time for five months. So, one artist for 2 1/2 months full-time. $10,000?
Asset store, let’s say each package averages $50. So, you can buy forty packages. For each area you listed, that would give you about eight packages. But you forgot things like particles, sound, etc. So you might be able to make something small.
