Every month Epic Games giveaways several assets on the Unreal Engine marketplace and December is no exception. This month we have 5 new assets that are available for free until the first Tuesday in January, but once “purchased” those assets are yours to use free forever. Speaking of forever, there is also one new asset in the permanently free collection.
A common question with these assets is can the be used outside of Unreal Engine. Generally the answer is yes, unless the asset was owned or sourced directly by Epic Games, like the Power IK asset this month, in which case it can only be used in Unreal Engine projects. You can learn more about this months UE4 asset giveaway in the video below.
There are only a few days left in Unity’s 10th Anniversary MegaBundle X that we previously discussed here. Taking a quick look through the assets in the bundle it becomes clear that there are a number of assets that would be perfect for people looking to create a racing game. Today we are going to look at the following assets from the bundle:
Quickly and easily create and populate road networks using a simple spline based approach, both in the editor and dynamically at run-time, with a terrain aware system.
A collection of toon shader styled racing cars, rally cars and monster trucks. It also contains several props, track pieces and more for creating a full racing game with a consistent art style.
They’re trees. Oak trees. There are 5 of them, enough said.
The above links contain affiliate codes that pay GFS a small commission if you purchase anything (thanks so much if you do!). Of course be sure to use the Bundle Link and not individual asset links to get the savings, at least until November 12th. You can learn more and see all the above assets in action in the video below.
Even if you already have the bundle we have you covered as there is a bonus draw containing 5 additional asset packs that are not part of the bundle. Be sure to specify which bundle you are interested in entering for when you enter. On Monday we will randomly select two winners who will receive the highest tier of the Ultimate Fantasy bundle and one winner of the bonus bundle. Good luck!
You can learn more about the Fantasy Bundle here and learn more about the giveaway and see additional bundle assets in action in the video below.
With the recent Fantasy 3D Models humble bundle there were a number of questions about how assets can be extracted from the Unity game engine for use in other engines such as Godot, Unreal, Lumberyard, Stride, CryEngine or basically any other 3D game engine. That is exactly what we will look at in this tutorial, as we have in the past in this tutorial for Unreal Engine. Fortunately assets in the Unity game engine are generally stored as FBX files and textures are stored in image file formats, making this process a fair bit easier than it was in Unreal.
First and foremost you need to download the assets. Unfortunately to do this you will need to have Unity installed to perform the download process. (If you know a way to download unitypackage files from the command-line or outside of Unity, please let me know and I will update!) First you are going to need to purchase an asset from the Unity Asset store (or one of the several available free options). Once you have one or more assets on your account, fire up Unity and create a new project (type doesn’t matter). Next select the Package Manager in the menu Window->Package Manager.
Next in the Package Manager, in the top left corner drop down the menu and select My Assets option.
This will load your assets. If you have several assets, you may need to click Load More and the bottom to find your asset. Once located, select your asset in the left hand list, then select the Download button on the bottom right menu.
Repeat this task for each package you want downloaded. Once you have all of your assets downloaded you can close Unity. Now (on Windows at least) go to Windows Explorer and enter %APPDATA% in the location box.
This will automatically expand into the relevant folder name. Next navigate into the folder Unity, then Asset Store-5.x. In my case the full directory is C:\Users\serap\AppData\Roaming\Unity\Asset Store-5.x.In this folder will be a list of companies, these are the creators of the assets as named on the Asset Store, pick the one you downloaded earlier, then open up the asset within that directly. You should now see one or more files with a unitypackage file extension. Copy the asset you want to use to a directory of your choice.
Now we are going to need Unity Package Extractor, download Unity Package Extractor. Extract the zip file to the same location that you copied your unitypackage earlier. Now open a command prompt and CD into that directory, in this example lets assume c:\temp. Run the commands:
cd \temp
extractor ‘packagenamewithextension.unitypackage’
This will extract out all of the assets ready for your use. Tada, done! You can learn more about this process, step by step in the tutorial video below.
There is a new Humble Bundle of interest to game developers, this one is the Ultimate Fantasy Game Development bundle. It’s a collection of fantasy themed models, full rigged, textured and animated with tons of modularity and different texture packs. Even more impressive, the package is available as keys for both Unity and Unreal Engine asset stores and the models and textures are in a format that can be used in any 3D game engine with ease. As with all Humble Bundles, this one is organized into tiers:
1$ Tier
Plant Monster
Rock Monster
Mushroom Monster
15$ Tier
Giant Worm
Minotaur
Mimics & Chests
Medusa
Locks and Lockpicks
25$ Tier
Spiders
Dragons
Humans
Armor Pack 1
Weapons & Armor 1
Character Accessories
Trolls
Demons
Magic & Melee Sounds Library
Devils
As with all Humble Bundles, you get to decide how your money is allocated between Humble, Charity, the publisher and if you so choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GFS purchasing through this link. You can get additional asset packs in the same art style created by Infinity PBR on the Unity Asset Store. You can learn more about the asset pack in the video below.
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Unity Asset Store, Unity are running the Mega Bundle X sale. This is a collection of assets organised into tiers, very similar to a traditional Humble bundle. If you buy a higher dollar value tier you get all of the assets in the lower tiers as well. The tiers of this bundle consist of:
10$ Tier
25$ Tier
36$ Tier
Be sure to use the bundle link and not the individual links above, as the sale pricing is only on the bundle itself, individual assets are all still full price. You can learn more about the bundle in the video below. Links to the bundle, including this one, contain an affiliate code that pay a small commission to GFS if used (and thanks if you do!).
Unity have just launched a new interesting publishing program for indie game developers that have or are creating free to play mobile games. Essentially Unity are offering to fund the promotional costs of selected games and provide monetization, growth and ad placement support over the lifetime of the game. Of course this comes at a cost and that cost is a 50/50 revenue split, with a scenario described on the Unity blog:
We want to be clear about the terms up front so you can decide if Game Growth is the right program for you. Let’s break down the revenue sharing with an example:
1- An indie developer has a mobile game that makes $3,000/month. They apply to the Game Growth program. Unity spends $100,000/month to acquire new users to the game, retains those users with dedicated live operations support, and grows the game to $130,000/month in revenue.*
2- Unity would first recoup their $100,000 in monthly user acquisition costs, leaving $30,000 in monthly revenue. So the developer and Unity would share that $30,000 equally, giving $15,000 to the developer and $15,000 to Unity.*
*This model would continue throughout the partnership. We’re using this fictitious example to illustrate the revenue sharing model only. The exact investment/revenue amounts will not always be consistent month over month.
One major advantage to this approach over a traditional publisher agreement is you retain all control over your company and your games IP with minimal commitment requirements. If you are interested in applying you can do so in the Unity Dashboard.
In addition to the Unity Growth program, there is also an asset giveaway going on right now. You can get the POLYGON Prototype Pack for free using the code ‘SYNTYSALE2020’, available until October 20th. Additionally Synty assets are currently on sale for 50% off. Both of the above links contain an affiliate code that pays GFS a small commission if you buy anything. You can learn more about the new Unity publishing programming and the assets in the video below.
It’s the first Tuesday of the month and that means it time for Unreal Christmas in October. Every month Epic Games gives away several assets for Unreal Engine developer and this month we got more than double the normal amount of new assets!
This months “Free for October” assets include:
The “Permanently Free” collection grew a fair bit as well:
Just be sure to “buy” the free assets before the first Tuesday in November and they are yours forever. You can learn more about this months giveaway in the video below.
The ongoing Unity Game Dev Humble Bundle got even better today with the addition of 6 new assets. Don’t worry if you already purchased the bundle, you will receive all of the added assets up to the tier you purchased.
The new assets added to the pack include:
SNAPS Prototype Asian Garden
SNAPS Prototype Car Park
SNAPS Prototype SciFi Urban
SNAPS HD Asian Garden
SNAPS HD SciFi Urban
SNAPS HD Car Park
The prototype assets are low polygon models ideal for lower end hardware or as the name implies level prototyping. The HD kits on the other hand contain high quality HDRP pipeline assets for use in a commercial grade game. It should be noted that the HD packs are not currently updated to the most current HDRP and some breakage may occur. Unity have stated they intend to update the assets to the most current Unity version soon. You can learn more about the additions and see the SciFi Urban HD asset in action in the video below.
In addition to the new assets, we have already covered several of the assets included in this bundling including UModeler, Clayxels and the highly recommended Peek.
In the next part in our going look at key extensions in the Unity Game Dev Humble Bundle, today we are looking at Peek from Ludiq. In previous features we have looked at UModeler and Clayxels if you are interested in learning more.
Peek is a powerful add-on the greatly changes the way you work with Unity, including features like:
Dynamic toolbars the replace the requirement for the Inspector windows
Pop up support on Ctrl+F replacing the need for the Hierarchy window
Sticky drag and drop
Quick reference inspection
Creator to quickly create and place objects and instances in your scene
Multi-object grouping
You can see Peek and most of these features in action in the video below (or here on Odysee). Peek is regularly $60 on the Unity Asset Store and is half that price (with dozens of other assets and games) in the current Bundle, expiring in 9 days.
