AAA Quality Rigged Tools with Animations and Effects

Hello, fellow artists and developers

I am currently working on my next content pack that will continue to fill a gap if content in the UE4 Marketplace. Realistic tools that aren’t designed with either sci-fi/medieval genres in mind.

I began with the Handyman tool pack.

Now I’d like all of your opinions on if you’d like to see more tools that come pre-rigged and include both animations and sound effects.

A few examples of such tools would be:

  • Saw Table with Movable arm and blade.

  • Cordless Drill with spinning head, interchangeable tips, and removable/insertable battery pack.

  • Animated version of the Bar Clamp that is available in volume one of the Handyman pack.

  • Table vise with moving pipe jaws and rotating spindle and collar.

  • Box Cutter with interchangeable, retractable, and removable blade

  • Cordless Angle Grinder with interchangeable tool wheels.

Just to name a few.

Each tool will be sold separately with accompanying animations, skeletal sockets, sound effects, animation blueprints, animation montages, blendspaces, and quite possibly UE4 4.13’s physically driven animaton.

As far as textures go: Each model will come with an accompanying 4K Albedo, Normal, Ambient Occlusion, Roughness, and Metal Map. Along with 1-3 1024-1024 seamless detail normal maps, and nine dirt/grime masks that will be stored in the RGB channels of three separate textures as well as a custom dynamic bitmask material function that I crafted and use on a regular basis that allows for switching of individual RGB channel masks on the fly instead of being forced to recompile the shaders every time the masked channel needs to be changed.

But is this something people would be interested in? (I’m going to be posting the dynamic masking function on the forums for free soon regardless of the result of this communal inquiry. I just want to make sure that I have be most intuitive and easy to use setup before I release it into the wild.) I’d really like to get a feel for what the community thinks before I decided to go all in on creating all this content.

My plan is to sell each tool separately in a similar fashion to the approach Iron Belly studios has done. The prices would range from $4.99 - $24.99 for each product. (The price will be based solely on how much time and effort I spend on the product and what I would consider to be a fair return on the amount of work I put in.) I alao I would’ve done individual assets for the static meshes and sold them for between $0.99 - $1.99 a piece but Epic understandably has different guidelines for static meshes than for skeletal.

Anyway, enough of my rambling on.

Feel free to leave any opinions, thoughts, insights, advice, constructive criticisms, suggestions, questions, and comments below.

Thank you all for taking the time to read this, and have a good day/evening!

will they be free ? :smiley: i am poor enough XD

To me this sounds like it would be perfect for any zombie game where you can craft weapons, something like the assets you’re making would be perfect to have the characters use as they construct custom weapons on a work bench.
I’m sure there are other uses too, like any stage or map that has a construction back drop, but this is just what came to mind.

Unfortunately I’m working on a scifi game right now -__-

Unfortunately, as a college student who is already suffering the pressure of crippling student loan debt, they won’t be free. However, the purpose of this post was to find out if there is enough demand for me to have a rather low price and makeup for it by the amount of them I’m able to sell. If I see that there is a decent demand for it, I could certainly see myself selling each pack in the range of $4.99 (For smaller tools that don’t require a large variety of separate moving pi/animations, and different sounds to make and properly setup. Like the Box Cutter would be one for that price.) And maybe ranging up to $14.99 for the much more intricate models that have multiple moving parts. But most would likely be around the $5-10 range. Of course that’s if the demand is there. If it’s not, I would probably have to price a bit higher to even it out. (Not outrageously so, probably only an extra $5 at most.)

And I’d love to see people come up with some great uses for them. I just felt that there’s been a glaring absence of such things. So, I figured everyone would benefit.

However, I’m also thinking of giving one of them away for free so potential customers can try it and see for themselves whether it is for them or not.