I’m thinking of dipping my toes into the Asset Store by building some characters. I’m no coder or scripter though, so I’m concerned that anything I make won’t be customisable enough to make any sales.
I’d be able to provide a good quality, rigged character model using PBR materials, possibly with blendshapes for lip syncing and facial expression. I’d also make multiple levels of detail, although I doubt I’ll be supporting mobile. I’d potentially also include some texture variants/ palette swaps as well. That’d be about it though. Is this enough for you guys to warrant a purchase?
I plan to make some standard fantasy character types - fighter, rogue, mage, cleric etc. and sell them individually or together as a discounted pack. Worth doing? It’s a ton of work, somewhere in the region of 100 hours per character, so I don’t want to start this without any idea of demand.
Thats fine for typical art assets. The quality shown looks excellent.
As long as it looks good, is rigged, optimized good (few materials, smart poly distribution) and setup with a clean folder hierarchy then you’re golden. LOD’s are great if you want to include them. Animations are great as well but are an optional feature, a lot of people will have their own animations.
Any chance you can get some wireframe shots of those models, as well as the poly counts? I think that’d go a long way into showing if they’re game-ready, especially for mobile targets.
Only my opinion, but one thing that is lacking would be something like your goblin ( realistic art style, high quality) done to where you can make at least 10 or more different individuals using different weapon combos and skins. A good example is Mister Nectures´s Ratkin pack Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making You get a decent variety of weapons/armor pieces as well as 3 different skins. Normally that pack sells for $50, which is a steal because I was able to make about 30 unique creatures with it which adds a huge amount of variety for players to fight against. Also with the different skins, I was able to add them to different climates within the game which added a sense of realism. My swamp rats look different than my mountain rats etc.
As the above poster said, an LOD or two would be great and make sure you use a humanoid rig and test it with some of the free packs out there. If you can add some animations, it is a bonus and will probably allow you to increase the price, but I think many of us already have a pretty big library of humanoid animations.
As far as races, obviously goblins/orc type stuff is decent, but as the ratkin example above, it is great to break out and try some new races. For instance Tiny Utopia has a crocman, gnoll, lizardman and frogman that are all decent models, but unfortunately lack the variety that the Ratkin has above. I would love to see him go back and add some more weapon/armor combos and maybe some derivative models to each of those 4.
If you choose to go this route, I would recommend advertise that you are going to be doing more than one race. I am more likely to buy your goblin pack if I know the same artist will later be doing orcs, lizardmen, dogmen etc. I am very hesitant to buy creature models from an artist who jumps around with what they produce(creatures, props, environments). For games, we like to use the same artist for as many creatures as possible, which is one of the reasons guys like Profactor do so well on here.
FWIW… I need about 4-7 more races for my game similar to the ratkins
Thanks everyone for your feedback. It’s been very valuable. It’s hard to find info out there on what people are looking for, so keep it coming please. I’m a long time member of the polycount forum, and questions like this come up a lot.
No problem, although I don’t plan on supporting mobile, at least initially. I’ve been a professional games artist for about 15 years now, so I’m very aware of how important optimization is. Draw calls seem to be more important than polycount these days, although I still try to keep both to a reasonable level. Note that I’m not going to be selling these specific models, I just put them up as examples.
My portfolio has some Marmoset Viewer / Sketchfab stuff on it if you’d like to see more of how my models are constructed. This guy is around 16000 triangles, including the weapons.
I agree completely about polycounts. One problem is that people are still throwing around ´suggested´ numbers from 3 years ago and not taking into account that computers have gotten more powerful and will be even more powerful by the time we launch our games.
But the bigger reason is that in the last year or two, there are just very powerful, and very cheap tools available to effortlessly create LODs in seconds within the Unity Editor itself. I bought a tool on sale for $15 called SimpleLOD that in seconds creates 1-5 LODs(and sets them up for you), merges meshes, and creates new atlases for reduced draw calls. The optimization tools are out there, are cheap and fast, there is no reason for an artist to waste a lot of time over-optimizing, that time would be better spent working on the next model.
I worked with the SimpleLOD guy on polishing a few finer points and can confirm that for our needs it is an excellent system.
Back to the topic at hand, mainly what others have said.
Variations (meshes, not colours),
Flexibility (include a blank UV mapping for example with the areas written on),
A basic controller if you are going to bundle animations (unity makes it so easy to make the characters “controllable OOTB”) it makes all the difference to beginners,
Support (be prepared to fix those niggling Skin issues, be prepared to add support for Whizz-Bang Uber-generic Mega-rigging or w/e the next format is that comes along).
Try to put together/obtain automated tools to apply/upload such changes to your back-catalogue of 5 million models…
DO NOT export models with incorrect Y-Up rotations and fix them in a prefab (sigh, if I had a dollar…).
Ensure that models with hair have hair that can be seen from both sides (sigh…).
You are a professional , much of this is given. but you asked.
Go for high quality, and volume. Advertise, a lot. Perhaps provide /ONE/ free model of each sex to draw people into your work (people like free). Competitions, Sales, be prepared to not just be a “modeller”.
Whilst I have never sold a single item on the store I have spoken to make authors and eye-balled a few numbers from time to time. In many senses sucess on this store seems to be in the mind. There are those who set out there stall on a single product, those who run very many (Mr Necturus link already inserted above somewhere) but all of them only do as well as their original mindset allows them to think they did.
Ultimately: Make each sale be as fantastic in your mind as the first, don’t let the victories become Pyrrhic and good luck to you Mr Sawyer.
Things you need:
-Volume. It’s how you make up for low sales per model.
-Armour variations for heroes, or detachable armour, and definitely detachable weapons
You have probably already rigged it to match most animations on the asset store, so just provide weapons which match those movements.
