Sunday 6 September 2020

September free for the month

 September has been a good a month for free UE4 marketplace asset packages. Besides the two mentioned in my previous post, the September "free for the month" packages were released a little later. I plan to use two of them.

First there's Bunker, a nice, very modular set of meshes for making underground bunkers.


https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/bunker

It can be installed on Unreal Engine 4.16 or higher and uses very simple materials so it's quite easy to down port to a lower engine version like 4.15.0 for Unreal Tournament 4.

Packing the demo map in UT4 filesize comes in at over 1.1GB but that's with a lot of 4k and 2k textures. By simply LoD biasing to reduce texture sizes to 2k/1k I got it down to a little over 120MB with not much loss of visual quality. Packing the metallic, roughness and ao textures into MRA maps would reduce it even further.


The other new package is Starsphere. Something that is very lacking in UT4. Similar to the skysphere blueprint only for space skies and more versatile. 

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/starsphere

This is a very small but quite good package available for UE4 4.12+ (I wish I'd noticed that before porting it by hand from 4.25 to 4.15). Besides the many adjustable parameters for stars, it has parameters for things like space dust, blackholes, novas, Saturn and the Sun. There is also a planet blueprint with panning textures that make the planets look like they're rotating with different speeds for surface and clouds, have atmospheres and includes textures for Venus, Earth and Mars.

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