New UE4 developer here with several years hobbyist game programming background. I’ve recently begun learning UE4 and am enjoying myself thoroughly.
I’ve almost finished work on my first marketplace submission - it’s a blueprint plugin that makes it easy to add cinematic bullet time experiences to your games. I need to develop a sample map that demonstrates the functionality though.
I’m wondering what the licence is for the assets in the UE4 samples that Epic provides. I can’t see a licence or readme file with any of the samples I’ve looked at. E.g. I’d love to use some of the characters or textures from the ‘Showdown VR’ demo to kick-start development of my sample map (which will be bundled with my plugin). Is this allowed? Obviously I would credit the source of all assets I didn’t make myself.
I searched and couldn’t find an answer to this anywhere - my apologies if I didn’t search well enough.,
Yes you can.
From FAQ:
"Q: Can you use the content in the marketplace for commercial use ?
A: You can use all of the free Epic content in the marketplace commercially in any games you build with UE4. This includes all of the content residing in example projects. For example, all of the weapons, meshes, sounds and materials in Shooter Game. Tappy Chicken even!"
I used the “Owen” model for quite some time. And I have since changed that. Cutting over 200 megabytes off the download size. And that is just one model.
For my asset it was a good trade off, the default character works just as fine.
The free content can be used in your games, but marketplace submissions I think are an “on case” basis. A general starting rule is to only use what you need to in order to best show your content. As was saying, you should also think about how big files will be for people to download to use your marketplace item. My internet isn’t the fastest, so I definitely wouldn’t like to download hundreds of megabytes for a blueprint.
From what I understood, you can use those assets in order to illustrate your work. Normally, the license doesn’t allow it, but I have found in some post (can’t remember where) that adding some assets is allowed.
My advice is to add the assets you need (in moderation) then make your package and submit it by making it clear what you have included from Unreal and that these assets are not a part of your pack.
Just be honest with what you included and they will tell you if it’s ok. They seem to be rather flexible.
Edit: there’s already a marketplace product that uses Kite Demo assets for illustration: