FAB is a disaster, and we all know it.

General Feedback & Requests
21

I’d bet that sound FX pack has something like ‘bag opens’ sound in it :slight_smile: - quite logical for inventory, I think. About randomness - many sellers have asked Epic to shuffle search results so anybody have a chance to have some visibility.

Generally, you cannot tune search to satisfy both sellers and buyers or even different groups of target audience. I’d suggest to have something like different search profiles for that, like ‘for gamedev’, ‘for virtual production’, ‘whole packs’, ‘props’ etc. But considering how fast the development of Fab is it would explode their brains :slight_smile:

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22

hey , i have similar issue , you find any other Marketplace ? , i am thinking we create Own Marketplace like Old Unreal Marketplace, All Creators and seller we make unity and create New Marketplace according to our Requirements

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23

The main issue that works poorly is “Relevance”. I don’t know on what principle it works. But for six months FAB hasn’t offered me anything that I would want to buy to any extent.
On the contrary, finding even those assets that are interesting to me is a whole quest.
And I’m not writing this as a seller. But as someone who regularly collects assets.
But it has never offered anything interesting without a half-hour search. Well, maybe I’m just lucky, but it shows others what they really need.

P.S. I was looking for a model of a cartoon fox - it turned out that it was really hard to find. And I never found it. Then I miraculously noticed a link from an already purchased asset to a model from the same developer. But the search didn’t show it, but there were a bunch of assets that didn’t answer the requests at all. But after I had already bought the asset, it began to appear in search results.

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24

I think you’re right. And I guess they still go on tinkering with the search engine which could explain the saw-like sell statistics with extremely successful and absolutely empty periods.

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25

Yeah the whole UX is pretty bad, but what’s worse is you, as a customer, having to face thousands over thousands of AI generated slob assets of questionable quality and non-existant copyright.
How are you even supposed to find something good in all that mess, especially since most AI gen sellers don’t actually tag their assets as made with AI.

Sadly no matter how many sellers voice their concern and anxiety about this, Epic just ignores it.

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26

The developers responded on this matter. “If you see a product created by AI and it doesn’t have a check mark, write to support and they will contact the creator.”

27

and what happen when they get contacted ?

28

they will force you to tick the AI ​​box or the model will be thrown into the draft or kicked)

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29

See, this is where it feels a bit weird. I always thought that copyright laws were clear about AI-generated work. If the generated art is created without significant human input, the piece is considered public domain—so you can’t sell it, and anybody can use it. Theoretically, you shouldn’t even be able to make money off of it if the only work involved was writing a prompt.

That being said, AI as an assistant can be used in copyrightable work, and if the result is well-made and doesn’t break any copyright laws, then what’s the problem? For 3D models, topology and texture quality are often poor, and like illustration, a simple prompt can produce a full art piece that looks good—but with very limited creative intent. It essentially removes any true artistic expression from the process. On that front, I understand the frustration.

I’m a programmer, and a lot of us have embraced AI as a helpful tool. Sure, it’s led to a bad habit known as “vibe coding,” but let’s just say that this approach tends to produce terrible results for production-ready software. Also you’d bankrupt yourself doing it (any good AI for coding eventually starts charging per prompt.) That said, AI can still save us days of work, often by sparing us from digging through documentation or scouring the web for code samples just to understand how a function is used in context. Unreal’s C++ documentation is so lacking that having an AI to ask is a good time-saver.

As for 3D animation, prompt-based generators still seem pretty off. But tools like Cascadeur—a more guided AI tool for animation—are going in the same direction as coding assistants: empowering professional artists, not replacing them. There are also AI tools that use video input to generate animations, allowing people to do motion capture without expensive suits and setups.

My point is, the [AI] tag seems to also harm creators who use AI tools the right way. The filter for AI-generated work is applied to everything, not just 3D models. And if a piece was generated entirely from a few prompts, it arguably shouldn’t even be on the platform in the first place, at least from what I understand.

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30

There is nothing stopping you or anybody from re-selling public domain stuff. At least in general, because on Fab we have this:

in distribution agreement.

The problem is that quite a few people in Epic (including Tim) are very pro-AI, so I doubt the situation will change.

31

Well, reading the public domain clause, it seems to align with what I just said. It states that the original work shouldn’t make up the majority of the submission and should be modified enough to add new value to the asset. Since the original artwork refers to whatever comes out of the prompt, how is it considered acceptable to submit it directly to the platform without any significant modification ?

On another note, I might be leaning toward the side of AI submissions this time, but here another issue: how do you even detect them? In 3D modeling, bad AI textures can look similar, and overly complex topology with too many polygons might give it away. But even then, you could just chalk it up to a poorly made product.

What happens when AI starts doing those things correctly? Are we going to end up on a witch hunt, trying to figure out who used AI in their full submission and who didn’t? There are already illustrators getting accused of using AI just because their character’s hands look off or the lighting isn’t perfect.

AI detection tools are terrible at spotting AI-generated text or code. And short of a direct confession from the creator, there’s not much we can do about it. Honestly, if the only consequence is checking a box that flags your work as AI-generated, that doesn’t seem all that unreasonable compare to a full ban …

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32

Wake up!!! AI is the future! Soon AI will create better code, better images, better videos. It will replace even doctors, lawyers, teachers. Nobody can stay against the progress. Very soon, everything that humankind will create will be created by AI. I understand that accepting this is hard, especially because we humans think we are irreplaceable.. but now we are living the times when it is clearer than ever that we are not as special as we think.

33

Hmm, not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but here’s my take as a programmer with some background in machine learning: full replacement isn’t coming soon, despite all the hype and recent improvements. Nobody can predict the exact timeline, but there’s still a lot standing in the way.

The first issue is that it’s far from profitable right now—companies are losing massive amounts of money on infrastructure, and the only thing keeping them afloat is investor funding. Their primary concern in the coming year won’t be making the models smarter, but reducing costs. They’ll make announcements, sure, but honestly, those will be incremental improvement, not big leaps like we saw with the release of ChatGPT and the creation of o1 last year.

Coding agents still have a long way to go before becoming fully autonomous. They often add things you didn’t ask for, hallucinate basic mistakes you have to catch, and require re-prompting to fix them. (Though honestly, writing a prompt to fix that is just lazy if you already know how to code.)

That said, with clear and precise instruction (like asking for specific classes with defined feature) they can produce results that are surprisingly solid, sometimes needing very few fixes, if any.

As for 3D modeling and illustration, that’s a different story. I think eventually it will be able to deliver proper topology and texturing most of the time, if not all the time. But using prompts as the sole method of control makes it really hard to be original or expressive. If language is the only lever, you’re bound to see the same art styles over and over again. And once that happens, I doubt it’s the kind of “art” people will want to keep engaging with, it’ll just start to feel repetitive. Look at how superhero movies have evolved over time.

That’s why creating AI tools that feel like an extension of the artist, or any human worker really, should be the real goal. That’s the future, not images generated by prompts alone.

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34

Before that, the goal should be to figure out ethical ways of training, without stealing from massive amounts of people. Irony of this is that if tech bros succeed in replacing artists, their tools will stop improving as there will be no new data to steal.

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35

I would say it’s one of the challenges, but I don’t think it will significantly improve the current situation artists are facing. Does it really change anything if the models require less data to train, and companies just pay artists to feed their AI with specific art styles? I’m not an illustrator, but finding artists who can mimic the Studio Ghibli style and are willing to create paintings in that style to pay their bills doesn’t seem impossible.

Art styles can’t be copyrighted—and for good reason. Imagine if only one artist in the world could draw in an anime style. I think the main reason studios didn’t do this before is that they were already hiring a bunch of artists to create what they needed, so they might as well come up with something truly unique. Also, if you copy something too closely, it can cause backlash from the public—so why bother if it costs the same?

36

It does. Because until that issue is addressed all other issues are moot.

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37

I can respect that, but I don’t think it would solve the issue on Fab for example, just postpone the problem.

38

Yea, it wouldn’t. The problem is lack of quality control for that part of Fab (and overall lowered quality standards compared to UEM).

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39

Which is a lazy cop out, because they shift the responsible to us concerned sellers or customers, when in reality the responsibility is with Epic for allowing all the AI gen stuff to flood the marketplace - with zero quality control - in the first place.

And it’s completely unrealistic either, even if we had the time and will to go through thousands of AI assets to check for their marking and report every single one of them, cumbersomely through the reporting form - mind you without getting paid for it..

The AI gen sellers are just going to upload another thousand AI asset in a single day.

This is something that Epic has to fix, not us.

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40

Try suing your AI Doctor for malpractice.