Once again, I bought a character on the marketplace because it said it is animated. Now after adding, all I see is the different animation sequences, but no animation blueprint.
Yes I know I can create one myself, but I buy characters for prototyping only (since you can’t really use them in your published project anyway, or you’ll be called an assetflipper). So now I have to spend multiple hours to create the blendspaces for that character - that is IF I actually know how to do that. Which is valuable time that I lose.
Can we please make it a rule that animation blueprints are required if you publish characters? Or, if that is not possible, make it a requirement that the description makes it VERY CLEAR that the animation_bp (+ blendspaces) is not included and we have to create it ourselves?
Since we can’t ever refund a bought asset, it’s almost wasted money. I definitely won’t be buying anymore characters from the marketplace, because I don’t want to spend my time doing what the author should have done before selling it. I only have so many hours every day I can use. But giving a bad rating also sucks for them.
Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) all over the 'net is called an asset flip yes indeed… BUT … it sold 33Million+ copies with a $700Million+ gross overall … so it doesn’t really matter much. Yes indeed having all original characters is still a better thing anyway (and I am going to do the same for my own game although I will use some characters bought on the marketplace for minor and background roles) but it is not that you won’t sell because of that. It is not that people won’t buy a game or any other product just because they recognize reused assets. Indeed for the PUBG case the marketing was the key to sell so many copies and real small indie developers can’t afford any of that but still you shouldn’t be scared of being called an asset flip.
As long as you paid for the license you can reuse any asset including characters in your games and other products. It is your right to do so. The noise on the 'net against anyone reusing assets in games could or could not affect sales. But it is nothing automatic. The game can still sell many copies regardless as long as customers enjoy the overall experience.
I don’t really see an Animation Blueprint as necessary and it could almost be counter-productive to the seller to provide one, as it’s impossible for them to account for different player controller setups, so while they could make one that works with the default UE4 character examples, having ones that account for additional animations sometimes contained in character packages like crouching, crawling, climbing, interacting etc would be difficult to make modular enough to work in a wide range of scenarios as is often sought after in a marketplace asset.
I usually include the animation blueprint from the third person template for previewing purposes, but its expected that the customer would usually delete the animations and consolidate them with what is already in their project.
Yes, and I really appreciate this! However, if the character is not a humanoid that is rigged for the Epic skeleton - let’s say a monster or a robot - then it is really painful and time consuming for me to create the animation blueprint.
Why would it be so difficult to create and provide the blendspaces and a basic animation blueprint, and let the customer decide if they use it? They will surely appreciate having the blendspaces provided, and if they don’t need them and want to make their own blueprint, it doesn’t hurt having them either.
Also, I am sure most people buy marketplace assets for prototyping purposes, to quickly get an idea how something would look like. Having an animation blueprint provided helps immensly with that (saving time while prototyping).
Yes I can learn how to create a good looking animation blueprint myself, but honestly I have only so much time every day and I am not a 3D dev. Sometimes I just want to quickly prototype an idea and see how it plays / what it feels like. The way I see it, that is exactly what the marketplace is for.
Yes exactly. And we can’t refund assets on the marketplace, so it will be either wasted money, or you spend hours over hours to learn how to make an animation blueprint. Which is really counterintuitive if you’re not a 3D designer.
A simple rule for stating if the asset has an animation blueprint included would already solve the problem.
Maybe not, but it still isn’t a bad idea to force him to. If its not on the mannequin skeleton, he has to supply his own animations anyway, so might as well set them up in an animation blueprint and make sure everything looks good while blending.
If it is a humanoid, then there’s no reason not to just throw the third person template animation blueprint on it.
If the modeler doesn’t have the technical knowledge to do this, then that’s a big red flag. How is the modeler checking his vertex weighting if he’s not previewing animations in engine? How can I trust him to have done twist bones correctly?
Yes, I’m not saying I disagree;
I just think for a lot people this is just another “Turbo Squid”… I’d be surprised if many the sellers at least know how to setup a character in engine.
Its still better to test in-engine with the twist bones setup correctly. The shoulders will never look completely correct without them. I mean, you could do it in Max or Maya with constraints I guess. With humanoids you need to use the official animations to make sure you didn’t muck up your bone orientations.
They are missing IK bone animation and are kinda ugly, but the standard third person template animations are perfectly fine for testing your vert weights as long as you remember to add twist bones to the animation blueprint. What exactly do you mean by saying they are ‘done wrong’?
Of course, it would be best to test with several reputable animation packs from the marketplace, as the whole point of a standardized skeleton is to maintain compatibility with them.
This. And I think it boils down to a major problem the Unreal marketplace has = poor quality control, or poor minimum standarts. I bought so many assets that are not game-ready at all, or even outright broken, have wrong collisions, aren’t rigged to Epic skeleton even though it says on the description, aren’t scaled to Unreal size, …
All of that could have been avoided by a bit of effort on the creators side, which makes me wonder why these assets get accepted in the first place, if they are “tested”.
It leads to the general marketplace quality decrease a lot, till people don’t buy things anymore, because they can’t trust the marketplace anymore.
Quality should be a priority, not quantity. And in my opinion, a necessary animation blueprint for non-humanoid characters falls into that. It’s the Quality-of-Life improvement type that makes a marketplace great, not having 10.000 assets to scroll through.
I’d say it all forms from the demand and price. If customers were interested in buying twice as expensive packs but with everything included then creators would be adding blueprints. But in general, people don’t like to buy costly assets even when the expensive ones provide better quality. And UE algorithms motivate creators to post more often, rather than more complex. Would you be able to create a model with the animations and set up blueprints for it less than in a month to keep your sells? I bet not. We don’t have much of non-humanoid creatures on the marketplace because they are very time-consuming. Push creators to do locomotions and we’ll have none variety at all. But also there are plenty of generic locomotion systems for different creatures. Wouldn’t it be better to buy one generic blueprint for many assets and tweak a bit the setup than buying each asset twice its price with nearly the same blueprint attached to it?
