On January 17th of 2023, Unreal Engine Marketplace team decided unexpectedly to delete Questions and Review pages from all marketplace product pages. Reasons are stated on the linked UE forum thread.

A lot of sellers and customers alike are raising concerns and complaining about multiple implications of this sudden move. The lost of information that was poured on these pages during years is massive, and these resources were extremely useful for both customers and sellers to make better decisions about what to purchase or give support to buyers.

For the time being, I encourage all customers to visit Orbital Market. This site is an alternative front-end to the classic marketplace, and you'll be able to find Questions and Reviews page like before:

Note that I'm not in any way afiliated to this marketplace frontend, and additionally, they're suffering a sudden influx of new users in the search of the missing tabs, so you can expect some slow-downs, even downtimes. And well, Hugo: thank you so much for alleviate this situation with this excellent front-end!

This event is currently under development and we're expecting an answer very soon from UE Marketplace team. I'll update this page accordingly with the latest development.

And I'd suggest that if you're not agree with the latest change, let them know in this thread!

Update: 20/01/23

Questions and Reviews tabs have been restored!

Nice one!

Boolean / Remesh workflow

See the final artwork!

I don’t like real weapons. Period. But cg weapons? Oh my! there are such beautiful and well crafted models.. Sci-fi ones are my choice, but nice and good looking realistic weapons are fine too!

As a mixture of exercise and test, I decided to try my hand modeling a classic FPS weapon, heavily based on a glock model, with minor licenses. I've also took my sweet time examining the work of one of my favourite artist: Ranulf Busby.  There are loads of things going on on each of his works. Take a look now if you haven't yet!

And forgive me if I'm committing flaws. I'm not an expert by any means in weapons 😇

BREAKDOWN!

• Hi poly modeling

You'll need a healthy dose of pure poly modeling and subd, oh, and a deep understanding of modifier stack. I'm trying to de-clutter the stack using geo nodes, but there are still some nodes missing like this. So I'll focus on what we have for now. Feel free to use your favourite modeling addon. I'm a big fan of meshmachine and its bevel tools. It feels almost like you're working non destructively!

Things to consider: You need to plan in ahead. If you're modeling straight pieces, be sure to add enough resolution to curves and holes. As everything is made of faces and triangles, these "flat" elements will be tesellated by remesh modifier, so again, be sure to add enough resolution to curved surfaces

You can archive it either manually (yolo on your mouse wheel!) or adding a triangulate+subdivision combo in modifier stack. You need to mark as max creased the sharp edges to get a nice looking result. And of course, some big ngons should be divided in logical parts to help subdivision mod on its job. Now, before you start jumping on that quad topology bandwagon: this is the best part about the workflow. You'll not need to be much worried about it. This is not a wildcard to not learn proper modeling, furthermore, you will need these fundamentals to understand where the issues are.

Mirror, Triangulate, Subd, Remesh, Smooth Corrective and Decimate. BOOM!

You can even keep your booleans live, and that's a great choice to make tweaks later. Worth mentioning that remesh works in object space, and "dices" the object accordingly, Mind on this for for avoid excessive jagged edges on long straight shapes. Also, scale of dicing is relative to object scale. The result is a high dense mesh with nicely beveled edges:

The main drawback: enabling the stack modifier on one single object with a reasonable amount of tesellation, smoothness and decimation can easily go north 10 - 15 seconds on a top-of-line CPU. In my case, enabling the whole modifier stack for all objects takes 3 minutes on my 5950X. So, I'd advice to disable these modifiers when you're satisfied with the results. You can always come back later and adjust something and re-enable them. Work piece by piece, and you should be good to go. If you keep some sort of discipline enabling/disabling, you should be able to work at a nice speed. 

The final exported Hi-Poly (size: 587 GBs!)

Final Hi Poly, 21 Million tris. Eevee.

• Low Poly Modeling

As everything was kept live, I just duplicated the base object, and started to craft my "in-game" mesh. As it's intended as a new portfolio entry, I wasn't looking to do a extreme optimization of  curves and such, but I kept the final result under 36k tris that I consider a very healthy amount for a small hero prop . Should be perfectly fine on a close up inspection like most FPS do these days. 

I also decided to include a texture set per group (Sight, Muzzle, Grip, Body, Attachment and Flashlight) 

Using a weighted normal modifier helps to ease normal gradients on certain parts, but sometimes this doesn't work. As a remarkable trick, to avoid high shading gradient that could potentially damage the normal map bake, I used normal transfer on selected parts of the mesh, where hard edge splitting were not enough. Or simply, you can add more support geo, but this can be very time consuming.

Here you can see a simple hard edge based shading and a transferred one from a support mesh with proper normals. Faint shading lines dissapear. These are caused by long thin triangles on that part.

And I cann't stress enough how useful are certain addons, like meshmachine for keep bevels operative and manageable. Final tweaks and cleansing includes deletion of faces that shouln't be visible and shrinkwrap here and there to accurately match high poly and get nicer bakes without overextending the cage.

• UV unwrap and baking

Most people doesn't like unwrap. But I find it very relaxing, and it lets me to spot some troubled areas that I overlooked in previous stages, like rogue faces and duplicated vertex. Nothing new here: Set your materials accordingly with your bake groups and texture sets.

Don't get obsessed with a perfectly homogeneous texel density across the model. It's ok to have some slight degree of variance between groups, but try to keep it stable within groups. It's ok to reduce texel density of certain areas, like the inner part of the muzzle if they're not suppose to be visible during the game. Also, ride on the common lessons: keep straight UVs whenever possible, try to add disposable geo to avoid cylinder  bake waviness.. nothing new here. At the central stage, UV Toolkit, Texel density checker and UV Packmaster are the show runners.

Marmoset toolbag turn. After loading my meshes, and setting up my groups and mats, I'm ready to start the baking process. There are tons of tutorials elsewhere for this step, so I'm not doing anything special. After few skewing fixes and tweaks, here's the result:

• Texturing and Rendering

This time I've tried to reach higher levels of realism. I'm usually not tied to strictly realistic materials or textures on my sci-fi creations, so I've found very pleasing (yet challenging) to add subtle details to give some ground to the asset. I've tweaked manually all masks coming from different generators and I've stay relatively homogeneous on my base colors.

I've used a texture set covering each part of the weapon and authored my maps at 4k. This is a very common configuration on mid to high end FPS games. It can be reduced to 2k if needed easily , but judging the result in the viewer, I think it can holds pretty well 2k even on  a close up angle.

Finally, this is the first time I used Marmoset Toolbag 4 to elaborate my final shoots. Its a breeze to work with, and the quality is superb (here by limitations by Artstation, I can only show 2k textures)

Hope you like it! pew pew!

Edit: This piece was planned to be published few weeks ago (Dec 2021), but unfortunatelly I couldn't make it in time. So here I go!

Can't complain about this year*. I've done a bunch of freelance jobs and I'm really looking forward to disclose all the stuff that I've been doing. I also had the enormous luck to work with excellent people that never failed me one single time. I hope they feel the same with my work :)

Meanwhile these NDA's comes to an end and they release their projects, I wanted to write a small piece about the crypto currencies, NFTs and how they are being entangled on the video games and creators industry

During the second half of this year*, I've been contacted by a lot of crypto currencies related projects. They all shared at least one, if not all of these set of features:

• The organization where created few months ago. Therefore, its social media exposure was very short in time and not related to common game development forums or 3d marketplaces, etc.
• The pace of art stuff they need is "fast". They are also able to fuel with money this pace if needed.
• They seem to have a very low, if any, prior experience in the game development ecosystem, yet they use terms and notions vaguely to set some ground. 
• They have its own crypto token running on a blockchain (namely ethereum.. erc20..), or simply, they're planning to resell the artwork as NFTs.

Now on the targets of these organizations, you can find a true plethora of mostly unrealizable ideas about time travel, universal currencies, visit mars, or just feed some random pet. (not that visit mars is unrealizable, but if it happens, will not be thanks to a token)

All of that, salted with intriguing terms like tokenomics, little papers, burning, minting..

As a result, I've stopped working with crypto-based organizations.

Good luck explaining that to a boomer.

Don´t get me wrong. 

I'm convinced about the relevant stage that cryptos will reach in the near future. These are perfect for an eventual upgrade from old fiat money to an universally accepted kind of currency not supported by physical elements like bank notes and coins (I'm deliberately setting appart other considerations like central banks suply control or tracking money laundering, so take it as a lightweight point of view)  The value of the crypto industry is in ATH and surely it will rise even more in the near future as aceptance is increased by people and goverments alike. But right now there are plenty of mines to be avoided and lots of "real" money is being thrown to these crazy experiments. Losses can be really damaging to small economies, and lots of young people with more passion than brain are dumping their savings on this complicated, furious and changing landscape.

Your mileage may vary, but just to note that they're playing with old, yet bulletproof  tactics inherited from gambling industries during years. Endless chains of memes with lambos, "to the moon".. A lot of laws to prevent gambling addiction (and protect our children from these tactics) has been released during years, but unfortunatelly, in the wild west and the frenzy gold rush that is taking place, there's no law yet.  Its impossible to surveil every crazy NFT based and token project to verify if they adhere to any code of conduct. Meanwhile, they're thriving to gather lots of followers and fuel the "meme" economy, to rug-pull (or crash in the most cases).

Now, tagging all of this as a giant scam is a gross simplification of the phenomenon. Ubisoft is about to pull the trigger, following the notes that EA and other players have been publishing about the support of NFTs in their gaming ecosystem. These players should lead a correct implementation of all this technology to create a safe and healthy ecosystem to creators and players alike.

But for the time being. I realize that it is merely wishful thinking. Let's see how christmas season soften my sharp corners.

Bad habits are the thoughest to get rid of. Not because we're not concious about its consequences, just because it seems easier to just keep ourselves on the loop rather than break it. And tomorrow we can try again..

During these summer months, I've been making crazy holidays schedules, trying to keep on a balance my bussiness needs, my family needs and my own needs. No need to say that a honest look would reveal that I've (again) favoured my bussiness nuances a little bit. I'm not making hard judgements, I understand this is the way it is.

But some things shouldn't be as they are

During the hard lockdowns that took place in 2020, some mental health experts raised concerns about the impact of such extreme isolation from our usual social activities. Specially on older people.  Younger generations would be eventually able to ease the consequences with an increased use on social media. 

As the pandemic starts to fade out, we're still evaluating the long lasting consequences of this, and specially those related on how we build and maintain our relationships, being personal or professional.

And I'm midly optimistic when I see that the mental health is claiming its place on this new stage. From top sport figures to big companies stepping into the issue.  Lets add here the rising visualization of toxic behaviours on our industry, like cdprojekt red's crushing or Activision's sex harassment lawsuit. It's not hard to picture how much of an impact can cause these behaviours on people working there. Meanwhile its important to start visualizing the true size of this issue, I want to put a focus on the indie dev comunity. Much of the time, these small, even one-man-army people needs to deal, not only with the development of their project and associated risks, but with the community that they try to build around it, and the rampant toxicity of the smaller communities is worriesome, much of the time spurring direct attacks to developers if they don't act accordingly with their wishes. 

Or even a self inflicted anxiety of not being enought proeficient and falling behind your peers. Like you need to stay up to date 24/7 or you'll become a paper weight in no time.

Few days ago I found very interesting this thread from Andrew Hodgson, sharing the new work path that he will follow and the reasoning for that.  Andrew's work is superb and chances are you've already watched it on films during these last years. But he's drifting away from his main field of hard surface modeling, going thru a mostly conceptual field, citing (amongs others) the low cost of outsourcing. I'm pretty sure he's just taking the best path he consider for his own career, but the reason underlying is just a consequence of a trend that dilutes away the necessary link between job and personal growth. 

Ok, these are bussiness doing bussiness things, and I can see the happyness on that outsourcing ecosystem, but we're still pioneers from a historical point of view. This market has been around 30 - 40 years? Kids compared to more mature industries. Oh, now take a look at that part of industrial revolution and minimun wages and labour rights and how we reached these archievements.

Placeholder for a Sci-fi themed Rosie, that I hope to find very soon

To put it simple, we need tools, but also a strong unionized, protective and caring job ecosystem to avoid abuse and lost of added value. The more we fight on this field, the easier the way to stay happy and health.

Let's not pretend that having abusive, low income and unprotected jobs haven't impact on our mental health. And let's fight on it. It worth the efforts

One of the hot topics about marketing, PR, and other bussiness stuff is how to "control the narrative". When you're in control, you're essentially a step ahead of everybody.

Epic is on beast mode right now, they're at the controls!

Lets recap what they are up to on only five months:

• They're challenging Apple on the courts
• They just purchased Artstation, the most important artist portfolio showcase platform
• They released Unreal Engine 5 , the next major version of its real time visualization engine

Now, the last bullet is the one I want to discuss. I'll not going deep on technicals here, but some disgression would be considered for the sake of clarity. To me it's very perplexing how a highly technical event is wrapped on such layer of emotion and hype. Reminded me the feelings of being gifted with a computer being a child. I didn't knew a thing about Basic, or RAM. But that was so exciting..

What Epic did last week is gift us a glimpse on how the worlds can be potentially emulated breaking some walls that were well stablished. The two bright stars of the show: Lumen and Nanite.  Two new lightning and geometry handling technologies aiming for a high degree of photorealism.

80 million tris, butter smooth. Mesh by Nika Zautashvili

I've devoured the oficial documentation about these two toys, and I've still some doubts about good practices and potential new workflows. And, of course, some of the classic workflows just went tagged with a big "deprecated" label. One thing if for sure: This feels "next generation" if that makes sense.

Community reaction is passionate!

What an explosive cocktail of newcomers feeling atracted, loads of weird experiments and youtube stuff about the new engine, doubts and anxiety for FOMO'ing this "historic" chance to be part of something bigger.. that's the hype train at full throttle.

Let me breath!

Make no mistake!, all that jazz will come at a cost! First of all, someone could think that being able to handle raytracing and million of polygons without a hitch makes the engine lightweight. Let me tell you something: the showcased project (ancient valley) worth 100GB of SSD grade storage. Basically you have to defeat a juggernaut in the demo, but that requires 5 minutes of gameplay only. Take a look at the "minimun" editor requirements. The specs belongs to a top tier PC currently north 2k$

Now, if you're planning to make a bigger game with the new features using 3d scanned assets.. mind on 500 - 600 GB (or more!) of storage. Is your project good enought to justify this ammount on your players's storage? not mentioning the lack of support of lots of current gaming devices: mobile, nintendo switch, intel graphics cards..

I'm not advocating for return to the stone age. But I don't take decisions when the dust is not settled yet. Remember that there are massive amount of press and PR work behind to make you act quickly. I'd say we need almost one year and a half to start adopting the engine on a substantial amount, if not more.

But at the end of the day, we're all on this mice wheel running. Following that analogy, you need to run just the exact ammount to not be in the head and burn out rather quickly, and not be so slow to be expelled from the wheel. 

And there are competitors that will not stay quite for so long.

One thing is sure: the videogames we will enjoy next years will be awesome and ridiculously beautiful and detailed, thanks to people that push the boundaries on such strong way. 

What a time to be alive!

That was exciting! By 30th April, afternoon at GMT+1 (some would say closed night, but I'm spaniard, right? I dinner very late. period) this came to my usual feeds:

https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/artstation-is-now-part-of-epic-games

My dream job: meme maker. Now you know why I'm not making a living from that.

original pic by Lothar Dieterich @ Pixabay

Epic opened up its wallet and purchased the most important platform for artist to promote its work. Kind of a linkedin for Artists. Rushed by a teenager flavoured excitement, I went to epic's forum to ask for new features like a stronger integration between stores (life of quality improvements for poor salesman like me).

Then I got an answer from a fellow seller covered with a dark tone that raised my eyebrows (at first). The most relevant quote was about "..Everybody (being) still upset by the acquisition of Substances by Adobe and what came after they did". and literally "The less things changes, the better". 

Merge, acquisition, and similar procedures are done on a daily basis. The ones that reach mass media are obviously the bigger ones (microsoft & linkedin & github, Facebook & Whatsapp.. to cite few). And they are really interesting movements because it points very clearly why the whale moves. Sometimes the whale wants to eat a competitor, or just to acquire some new technology that finds interesting for its grow strategy.. these movements are deeply scrutinized by institutions and governments alike to watch out for a possible damaging disruption in the market. I know that these lasts lines are wishful thinking, but for the purpose of this piece, lets pretend that and move on. 

Returning to the specifics of Artstation being acquired by Epic, I cann't stop thinking how much relevant is this movement. Let's process this: they purchased the most important portfolio and promotion platform for artists. Now Epic can get UP TO DATE, MASSIVE DATA regarding to creative industry, the most relevant artistic genres and styles.. and much more. They're ready to know almost in beforehand what will be the next art style to be on the spot.

Nice one Epic!, that was a smart move. About the consequences, I'm not ready to make predictions, but there are a lot of people that directly foresee this change as potentially dangerous or damaging on a diffuse way. Adobe case was even more passionate with lots of strong discussions going back and forth..

Let me say that I'm a substance painter user from the beginning. I love the workflow, and the good apples outweighs by large the bad ones. so not everyone is still upset. I'm not upset at all, just the opposite. If Adobe knocks my door with a hefty sum, I can sell my bussiness any day. because the most important word is bussiness. We're competing on a bussiness environment, that doesn't care a dime about your passion, preferences, old grievances against Adobe or whatever. Adobe wants to take seat on the 3d content creation teatre. The best they can pay. Meanwhile I can see that old substance subscription model is going out, and they're introducing the expensive adobe way. But make no mistake. There are strong competitors willing to fish all they can of substance users that cann't afford a expensive subscription model. And I'm ready to check em all to select my next texturing tool if my current substance painter perpetual licensed version is not competitive anymore. But I'm not upset, I'm just trying to move along the flow, and why not, improve my skills at the same time.

This Epic purchase is neither the last, nor the first on a long road that will surprise us with big movements. But "the less things changes, the better." attitude is very worriesome. Brain is our best allied, and a strong enemy sometimes. He likes to keep things as they are because he's on a seeking comfort routine almost 24/7. Don't fall on that. You're a small fish, swim along the whale, not on a wrong way. Embrace the change as an oportunity, not as a threat. 

I can only say that this acquisition makes the most of senses to me, and I'm very ready to try improve my position, as a member of both platforms. Did I said I'm running a bussiness? yeah, I'm a 3d content creator that wants to maximize its profit and purchase the tools that makes me competitive and gives me an edge over my pals. Now change the bold text with your occupation. If you're a giant videogames and media company, I guess the quote is still relevant. 

My take away is not exempt of side effects, take a look at this piece from Alex Tardif about in-house game engines vs UE, Unity..  It's a bit technical, but suffice to understand that it's equally damaging to the landscape to have everyone upset, that just the opposite, to have everyone in the same boat.

Whales also don't want things to change, they want to keep feeding themselves just opening the mouth.

But for now, I'll stay along the whale.

What a exciting moment we live in. Videogames industry reached a noticeable milestone last year and it's not showing any sign of deceleration. Not to mention that the damn bug fueled the industry, but just look at the graph. With or without bug, it was poised to reach these heights sooner or later.

Source: Statista

Then you have all those exciting new toys called VR, Raytracing, GPUs shortages and mighty comebacks (AMD), and the last piece of the puzzle, the tools that artists all around the world are using on a daily basis to build the metaverse where we spend a nice chunk of our lives in.

For those not familiarized, when you see a finished character or asset on the screen, you're probably seeing the combined result of a team of artists and developers along with tools for modeling, concepting, rigging, texturing..

Now I'll talk a bit about my most beloved tool. 

Because I do love Blender, or better said: I've learnt to love Blender.

It's not an easy beast to tame. Full of shorcuts, menus, UI labyrinths... this is not a hammer, But a sophisticated piece of software that aims to cover the full pipeline from concepting to final production on VFX and modeling amongst other fields..

But

Yes, you knew it, there are monsters lurking around. I defeated few of them, but definitively the war is far from over.  As I'm aproaching to the final stages of a high poly model, the monster of performance shows its cruel smile. Because blender is painfully slow in edit mode. Let's frame this a bit more. If you're a low poly guy, just override this paragraph, nothing to see here. But if you're a subd warrior,  you know what I'm talking about. When you go 1M tris upwards, things starting to look like a mud fight. Then you make wrong choices and pull your hair out cycling into edit-object-undo... each one consuming 1, 2,3 seconds... not a good place to be.

And I'm running it on a top of line 5950X paired with a 3090FE.

No matter what you have to crunch polygons, you're due to fight here.

How did I get here?

Things get worse when you know the details..

• It's a regression. 2.79 performance was far better.
• Seems that the root of the issue is deeply buried in parts of the code that very few people knows in enought extension to try to fix it.
• The issue doesn't seems to be a critical task for development team.

Don't hold your breath.

EDIT 5/20/2021: Or maybe, yes. https://code.blender.org/2021/05/mesh-editing-optimization-initial-steps/

Another interesting issue that I realized during these years of dealing with Blender is the weird status of its "educational" resources. Let me explain. You can bury hundred of elephants with youtube content and short tutorials on how to make this, how to do that.. also, there are thousands of online courses covering the very basics of the software. Ok, that's not a surprise and you can extrapolate to almost every creative tool under the sun. Oh, and the donut!. 

At this point, you're tasting a long sip of some abundance paradox. There are so many resources.. what's the best for you?

I've no a solid answer. Make your way, try to find someone whose teaching style makes click with you. But something that I want to remark here, don't be fooled: Learning blender IS NOT EQUAL to learn MODELING. Because at certain point, geometry and shading models are basicly the same across all 3d design tools. And learning modeling is far more difficult.. just take a look at this highly technical forum about modeling.

And then, the famous blender addons.

Meanwhile I think there are great addons, and let's be honest, some of them are really fundamental to reach an effective workflow, I don't like how much intrusive can be some of them. They're just adding more shorcuts, more UI elements, more scripted actions.. pressing a key and adding two modifiers, three checkboxes and few edge values..and BOOM! you have a tangled mess that you don't know what's happening on your mesh. So, don't get caught by syren chants. My advice here would be: First, understand what an addon does, and why it does. because sometimes, you're just playing following the mindset of the addon creator rather than learn and develop your own style. 

I know that being a Jack of all trades is not an easy task nowadays. But the performance bit is a bit worriesome right now on my side. Lets wait patiently and be confident on the outstanding work of Blender developers. Hey, I got rid of my fail-safe, dumbproof freemium videoediting software and get things done in Blender video editor in my last project. That counts as a victory! And nobody is perfect, right?.

If writing a blog post on a foreing language weren't enought daring (English is not my native language boom! ) , naming it with such ampulous topic is checking all boxes about how to not retain audience.

So, if you're an experienced 3d modeler, or freelancer, you'd probably already know the topics that I'll mention here, not pursuing a pedagogic knowledge, but just give enought context to be on the same page when discussing some items.

And I'm doing this because I recently had a "premature" end on a project I was working on. Maybe the cause of this was a misunderstanding of some concepts that I should have had explained better.  This whole topic of how to deal with your customer is a world on itself, but lets go with some bullets that I've found interesting to elaborate during my freelance experience.

• Take nothing for granted.

We are naturally inclined to obvey some explanations because we assume that the counterpart knows the field that we're dealing with. And this is one of the first traps you need to avoid. Be sure you're explaining clearly all concepts to people that aren't familiarised with such highly technical terms. At the same time, don't overreact and give your potential customers a tutorial on how to bake from high to low. This sounds very simple but it's always a challenge: to result informative without being pompous, presumptuous, or just annoying. Customers want things get done. But they don't need to know necessarily how and why things are done as they are. 

• I'm focused on 3d Assets for real time visualization and videogames development.

If your project isn't directly related to videogames, we will need to make a tad of exploration prior to go ahead on route. 3d Assets for game development counts with lots of nuances and tricks that aren't useful on other CG disciplines.  Of course, I'm totally able to go ahead and work on other fields, but don't expect an optimal outcome regarding price/performance ratio. 

• I'm focused on Sci-fi, Hard surface assets.

This bullet is very similar to the last one. Don't feel tempted to post a "d'oh" gif now. Few months ago I was contacted by a exciting media company from CA that produces stuff for top tier level players.  They requested me specifically to model some scenery based on real world monuments. I rejected the tasks, not without a lot of pain! these clients are super-important to step up the game!. But in all honesty, it was not my field of expertise. Now, I'm not promoting this way of thinking, because being a Jack of all Trades has its advantages. I'm just telling I don't feel good dealing with stuff that I'm not focused on.

• I've a workflow (it isn´t perfect, but it's mine)

Everyone has deadlines, and I've my owns (probably derived from other customer's deadlines), and workflows aren't an exception. So, when dealing with 3d assets for videogames, there are standard workflows that has been proven to be solid. And they are made of steps and each one needs its sweet time. Meanwhile you can be "flexible", you also need to adhere to your own pace. Being able to adjust on the fly is very welcome on certain tight deadlines, but sometimes you need to say ‘nope’.Deal with some pressure is ‘ok’ but sacrificing your workflow to adjust yourself to unrealistic deadlines is a big ‘no’ on my dictionary. 

Customer relationships is a suggestive mixture of science and art, and there are no absolute answers, but for now, these are my guidelines for few of common questions that arises once in a while on my way as a freelance.

Feel absolutelly free to try change my mind! Cheers!

From time to time, I find people that throws very passionate opinions about the lack of original content and a general feeling of "cheapness" if someone uses pre-made assets that everyone can potentially own on their projects.

Meanwhile I cann't agree most of times (well, I'm a creator, and seller of these kind of assets), sometimes it touches very legit bases. And I do know how frustrating, time consuming, and lots of emotional energy are invested on creating a project (big or small, videogames, prototypes.. you name it)

Maybe you, as the project manager or lone indie dev, are also compeled to build all of it from scratch! even the engine!. And these kind of journeys are statistically very brave to put it softly.

To all of you, I can only say: much respect, and wish you the best of outcomes. 

Now, if you have a more "pragmatic" aproach to this field, then, using premade assets (being 3d assets, frameworks, whatever tool to help you on that).. is a must!, specially if you're having budget constraints, tight deadlines and a very small team (99% of the real gamedev world, hello!).

Because videogames needs to be funny, first and foremost, and later, you can add visuals, mechanics, sfxs. And using custom assets or premade ones will not make the difference on that first checkbox. I bet that PUBG is so funny that having pre-made trees, tables, etc.. doesn't make a mark on the big success of this game. Sure that would be better to have custom trees and so.. maybe. But we're not dealing with UBISOFT, EA.. that have virtually unlimited resources and a small army of 3d artists focused to create all the stuff. They're playing on another league, don't try it if you don't have tens of millions in a bank and willing to spend.

So, my answer on this is rather simple: do it! purchase content to help you to archieve your goals!, but on a good measure.. 

let me explain:

• Don't abuse, try to avoid to fill your project with pre-made assets, find a good balance between custom stuff and pre-made assets. If you fill your project with too much pre-made content, then, you're essentially making a showcase of other's work. 
• Find areas of low interest (like trees, stones, tables.. not hero assets!) and leverage your pre-made stuff there.
• Try to add some customization to textures and so, that will make wonders and definitively add a custom look to the prefabs.

Other use cases that I find particulary interesting to use pre-made assets:

• You're developing an internal prototype, so you're not publishing that stuff. Then, go ahead and use some exciting stuff rather than included classic meshes
• You're tired to see the same assets (hey Epic Mannequin, you rocks but after thousand of hours, I'm a bit tired to see you there), and you can use another placeholder character, until you develop your custom. bad ass character. This also can help you to be more "character" agnostic meanwhile develop your game mechanics.

As you can see, there are plenty of reasons to go ahead and purchase some pre-made stuff. I can only backup my words being one of the most cost effective sellers on the marketplaces. Not because I don't think these are cheap assets (some of then have would cost $2.000 or more if were a custom exclusive character),  but because I know how bloody difficult is to develop a project, and I'm commited to make my stuff totallty afordable to not be a source of finantial stress. "Many are called but few are the choosen" unfortunatelly, so lets make the bag lighter, shall we?