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Resources for finding free game assets for 3D games

I started making a list of sites with free (as in $0, not necessarily open source) resources where I've used/tested at least one asset. It's mostly to remind myself to revisit, but maybe others might find it useful! Will continue to edit as I go.

Remember to check the licenses for any assets you use!

Edit: since starting this post, I came across My First Game Jam's awesome list so check that out too! I'll try and limit this list to ones not already linked there.

3D Models

Kenney

Superpowers Asset Packs

OpenGameArt.org

Blendswap - Blender files only, but I've never had any trouble converting to .fbx.

Textures

Wild Textures

Texturemate

Pixabay - General stock photos, but I've found good textures here

Sound effects

Kenney

Freesound

NoiseForFun

Music

PlayOnLoop

UI graphics

Kenney

Mixed/A bit of everything

Unity Asset Store (you can do a search with "free" filter)

OpenGameArt.org (there are UI elements available even though it's not listed as one of the available "art types").

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Being careful, meticulous, and detail oriented: these are definitely excellent traits to have, but when that turns into slow and stubborn perfectionism... it’s bad news. Because if “success” is to get every little thing just right, having to change or undo any of it immediately feels like you actually failed.

I currently have some new physical and mental limitations, so revisiting big, long-term projects like Buffet Cats was kind of a wake-up call. Because right now, to make any progress at all, I really need to stop babying first drafts of designs/models/whatever and change how I work.

Luckily I found out about the process used in Astro Kat’s development. I’ve mentioned this a few times on Buffet Cats or my main art blog, but basically you do the bare minimum unwrap to make the mesh texture-able. No marking seams or packing islands etc. Then, the texture is simply 3 or 4 color gradients. It’s restrictive and I mean look at that UV it makes me wanna alphabetize my books or something but it’s fast and it works.

So. modeling and texturing 2017!Cat ended up taking maybe 1/3 of the time I expected. To be fair, I probably learned a lot from making 2016!Cat and that helped speed up the process. But even so, for me a least, the thing to remember is not necessarily to rush, but at the same time get something “down on paper” first. Because the second version’s going to be easier and possibly better, and then continuing to develop the third, fourth, nth versions will feel more like progress and less like you did a lot of hard work for “nothing”. 

1 & 2: Himalayan cat 2016 with a hand-painted texture and manual unwrap

3 & 4: Himalayan cat 2017 with a gradient texture and automatic unwrap* * with quick manual adjustments 

Keep reading

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Hey Unity3D + Blender users!

If you use the (very handy) texture atlas function in Blender, your Unity import might have some unfortunate texture placement going on. If that's the case, try checking Swap UVs in the model’s import settings.

I'm wondering if I generated a texture atlas and never used it? But it looks like there was a second, Blender texture atlas generated UV attached to these models.

Oddly enough, both Sketchfab and Maya selected the correct UV by default!

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Baby ocean steps

Wave texture from a Creative Market freebie (did you know they give fonts and graphics and stuff away every week?) and this water ripple script.

I used to obsessively model everything in Blender and then stick it in Unity to figure out materials and such, but just plopping down some cubes directly in Unity just to see if it all works is going to be a much faster way to go. I didn’t expect the lighting to look so pretty, which I would not have realized in Blender, so that alone probably saved me a good chunk of time.

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Access to Lynda (Seattle area)

Recently I found out that Seattle Public Library gives card holders free access to Lynda! There are lots of good 3D and animation tutorials in there and I’ve already watched a bunch for Unity. It looks like King County Library does the same thing, but if you’re not in the area it might be worth checking with your local library to see if they have something like this in place.

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On skyboxes

The default procedural sky in Unity is a bit drab, and I do think Bob Ross was onto something when he kept painting those happy little clouds. So I set out to make a skybox!

For Unity you create some kind of projection map (cube map, sphere map), make it a material, and set that material under Window > Lighting. The hard part is making that map...

I tried four different methods, and the third one listed below worked best for me. My issues with the other methods might’ve just been user error, so I think if the process for method 3 gets too tedious I’ll give the others another shot.

1. Texture paint directly on a UV’ed cube

This can be done in both Blender and 3D Coat, but it feels pretty awkward.

2. Unwrap a cube in a cross and paint from the UV layout

This is the “normal” approach in that you’re doing exactly what you’d do if you were texturing a cube. If you unwrap in a horizontal cross Unity will convert accept it if you import the texture, select cubemap as the type, and apply “auto” mapping. Here are two of my first attempts.

Note that you really only have a very narrow area in which to paint. I found it easiest to paint clouds on a separate layer in Photoshop and then transform them to be smaller and more squished looking.

IMO the downside to this is that it’s hard to see what you’re doing with these adjustments. You’re adapting the image to the UV (as you’re supposed to when texturing) but the next method lets you adapt a UV to the image, sort of:

3. Set painted texture as an environment then project onto a cube

I read this tutorial for 3DS Max and thought the equivalent for Blender (Cycles) would be baking a reflection onto a cube. Couldn’t get this to work so I switched to Blender Internal and followed this tutorial instead. It worked! You can adjust how the sky looks on the domed cylinder that is your “environment” and then render the map afterwards. The downside here is that AFAIK you have to manually slice up to the resulting environment map into six images for Unity.

4. Use orthographic camera to render in Cycles

Here you create the domed cylinder to get the benefit of adjusting the sky before rendering, except you use the orthographic camera to render onto a cross cubemap layout. I kept getting a curved horizon in the end result, though.

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After a long break for both work and health reasons, I’m back to working on Buffet Cats and learning more Unity/game dev in general. I’m focusing mainly on this game for now and you can see the regular updates for that on my Twitter, Instagram, or the Buffet Cats tumblr. But any experiments/findings/observations from working on Buffet Cats will be discussed here, along with as any other general game stuff!

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My Menswear Dog model on Sketchfab made it onto BlenderNation’s weekly roundup!

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Hello world! I’m back from a big (3 month!) hiatus taken for work/mental health/physical health/family reasons and have started doing little personal projects again. Lots of low poly experiments to come, here is some Menswear Dog fanart in progress.

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I found this neat script from UCLA Game Lab which will take a 2D image with alpha and extrude it into a 3D mesh. I tried it with the clouds in my PUNCH environment and it’s fun! Just a little less back and forth between Unity and Blender when trying out new ideas. Compatibility note: ignoring all the warnings about the script being for Unity 4 worked fine for me.

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Session 3: Movement and recoloring. Goofy not-a-walk-cycle walk cycle courtesy of forgetting how to copy paste in reverse in Blender (hint: Ctrl + Shift + V) and a “paintover” (recoloring a screenshot in Illustrator). The colorful clouds are the monster colors--I’ve been having some color management weirdness so that blog on the right should be green and not orange...

Next session will be dropping monsters from the sky!

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such a heroic face

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Kind of liking this pink color scheme?

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I’m still working on Buffet Cats, but in the meantime I also wanted to try pushing out a game ASAP, game jam style. So because my brother really likes One Punch Man I decided on a Kick (ie catch all of the falling things) clone where OPM is defending the grocery store from monsters falling out of the sky. Conveniently monsters in-universe are actually destroyed in one punch, so that makes the game mechanics pretty straightforward!

My plan is to work from Unity’s breakout tutorial and edit to fit gameplay. I finished the concept and the player model during session one back in November/Decemberish, and today I finally got around to doing session two (environment and monster models). Sessions have been about 2-3 hours, but I’m expecting the next few to take a bit longer since Unity is still almost brand new for me. Not sure when the next session will be but I’m feeling pretty good about the plan so far!

One Punch Man by Crista Alejandre on Sketchfab

Did I already post this? A straggler from the end of 2015.

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Makin’ a grocery store