I’m looking to see gauge what type of items are most in-demand for Unity users in the asset store. I’m an experienced 3D artist and am looking into the option of starting to upload content to the store. I have a primarily character background, but am trying to gauge what is of most interest to the community.
I know that a lot of users are using models to do pre-vis work or design, so that would lead me to believe that generic “props” would be the most in demand.
Is there any demand from the community for high-quality character models? I would assume that many developers would hire an artist as a freelancer for character artwork for their game, but I’m not sure.
Ideally, I would be targeting uploading high-quality character models with full support for PBR materials.
I would say, Large Enviroments or Super Large Enviroments !
eg. Large/Super large forests, deserts etc. space planet surface terrain etc.
(The last one is scary!)
Not all of the Enviroment packs on the asset store, whether it may be its look, scale or appearance, would suit everyones taste/style or preference.
Note: Large Super realistic/near super realistic, Waterfall filled areas, are a rarity, on asset stores!
A good handful of people have asked for them. But they are hard to find!
This is a good idea to start from!
-Decent looking, low priced models that can be cobbled together a la Slaughter Grounds (see : jimquisition - slaughtering grounds & asset flip).
-Starter kits that can be built and as is be a game by the lowest standards (see : jimquisition - unitz & asset flip).
I see greenlight full of things like this. If you make a lot of content and price it reasonably, a ton of indie developers will buy it for testing / release. If you’re okay with your models occasionally ending up in effortless cash grabs (ie : Slaughtering Grounds), you’ll make a fortune lol.
More props! Furniture (Old, Victorian, new age, sci-fi, etc.).
More horror models (zombies, masked killers, investigators, horrific looking nightmare monster something out of the Cthulhu Mythos for example, etc.).
More planetary structures for 4X style games complete with 3 levels of upgrades (basic building, upgraded building, advanced building, resources, etc.). Star ships to compliment the sci-fi 4X games (similar to design like Star Trek or Babylon 5), or a star ship construction pack to build almost any ship design with many textures to apply.
2D GRAPHICS!
Tilesets, sprites, etc.
For all types of game genres. Horror, sci-fi, fantasy, historic, modern, western, etc.
Just look at the front page and look at top grossing of the sections. Theres already 10k+ models in the asset store which is why you have to give it a real think. Id guess tom is right that you might want to target ‘asset flippers’.
I miss good, but cheap texture packs. Let’s face it: Textures bundled with Unity aren’t that great and are victim to what I call “griding”, i.e. from large enough distance (which is closer than you think) you can tell where, say grass (but this happen for other too) texture has its edges if it’s tiled. Example:
I know what a wall looks like and it takes 5 minutes to make. I also know what a house or a skyscraper looks like, again no need…
What I’m always on the lookout for is decent PBR substances, noise textures and regular PBR textures (substances preferred). Also advanced materials (holographic, parallax, sun, planet) y’know really funky stuff that I can’t be bothered to do and can’t be spanked for asset flipping.
Right now I am looking out for a collection of Medieval/Fantasy UMA Character models. There isn’t a wide selection of UMA models, and coming from a character background, it shouldn’t be too hard for you.
There is a huge asset hole when it comes to the UMA and clothing textures. There has been one Male Model modern clothing pack and that is the biggest update so far.
Feels almost like that project is largely abandoned.
I am also going to add a number of scripts to auto-build piping, corridors and structures with radial arraying, stacking with offsets and scaling, translating and arraying, greebling etc. The idea being you add a script and just start dropping the technoprimitives into the array slots check a few boxes and it will automatically configure and reconfigure the array members to make buildings, exotic machines, spacecraft and etceteras in infinite variety…a kind of advanced primitive prototyper. Dozen of variations will be able to be configured to get something you want in minutes by simply changing an array member or order of array members. All the UV’s are set up to go edge to edge so you can tile the textures seamlessly as if you have something huge versus something small then obviously beside comparing to something of known scale the texturing imparts the feel of scale.
Here is a PBR Substance based shader I am putting up on the Asset Store shortly after I do the webpage and pdf. It will work on any quadruped type creature. It uses a K9 but I am providing UV map png’s so you can configure the UV’s on your quadruped and basically just lay them out like you would stretch an animals pelt out. http://mindreleaselabs.com/UnityDemos/PeltUberShaderDemo.html
I got one coming for reptile/dragon/alien skin that allows infinite variations of pattern/colors and normal map surfaces of different scales and skin surface variations
Ya UMA skins are badly needed but not sure if that’s a money maker. Modular character design is a big thing in studios making real games with customizable characters, yet on the asset store they basically don’t exist outside of UMA, which has it’s own issues.
I would kill for a character pack that broke down the models into sub meshes that were designed to be mixed and matched and textured individually.
Basically break up the character mesh into logical parts like head, torso, arms, legs, etc… Or go as far as more detailed parts like hair, nose, etc… Now make the area where those meshes connect uniform in size and scale. Now you have something that you can easily extend.
If you teamed up with a developer you could really make this shine. WIth careful model design you could easily create editor scripts that let you assign mesh parts to a character, and then the script would let you scale the character as whole and with click combine it all into a single mesh. Or even make it a runtime thing where you have a design scene, that’s probably easier especially when it comes to making the UI look good.
IMO this approach would be more popular then UMA. It’s less flexible but UMA is pretty daunting for most unity users, and it’s also daunting for designers as evidenced by the lack of UMA skins on the asset store.
Really need much more old west (cowboys etc) type of assets. Buildings, characters, environments etc. that is not cartoony but more authentic. My 2cents.
Just wanted to say I’m in search of the exact same thing and 100% agree with this. Assuming this is the correct method to create customizable characters, and not something more code/run-time based. In my case, something like WoW were the user can pick different faces, hair styles, body types, and weapons, armor, and clothing. A lot like Mixamo Fuse, but not designed for the end result being one-off characters the end-user/player cannot customize.
anything with consistency, i would better see an assets with lot of similar assets on the author page, which allow you to make a full game, having one assets with very few content is useless
