How to get ready a 3d asset package for download
HeadingPreparing and making a visually attractive presentation for 3D asset packages
Some of you already know our Open Source initiative. For those of you who don't, I'll summarise it very briefly:
We have released a lot of assets and 3D scenarios from some of our projects for people to download and use as they please. And yes, totally free of charge. In our GitHub and Sketchfab accounts.
In order to share our creations under the premise that "sharing is caring", we had to make all our asset collections ready and usable. That’s why this article, as we want you to know how we sliced up our projects, refined their assets to make them as modular as possible and obtain an attractive pack as a result.
Definitely, the story of how we improved our 3D environments into something for others to directly use and share. Let's take a look at the technical processes our projects went through before being released!
Resources
First steps
Firstly, we have to take a look of the general scene, and start to get familiarized with all the models and materials. We have to observe how many of these models are separable and how many modules we can create from them.
Select the object, press Tab to enter Edit Mode. Right click and Separate → Selection.
Asset listing & nomenclature
Once we have every model we want to use ready, we have to list each asset in a Notion board, or your trusted table or listing program, such as Excel. The important thing is that everything is neat and tidy.
We recommend the following nomenclature:
- “Name_Art” (each model has to have that “Art” suffix)
If there is more than one model of the same type it’ll be indicated with numbers.
- “Name_01_Art”, “Name_02_Art”, etc…
A more specific example:
- “Table_01_Art”, “Table_02_Art”, “Table_03_Art”.
For textures, we use the following nomenclature:
- “Name_Albedo”
- “Name_Metallic”
- “Name_Normal”
And for materials in Unity we use:
- “Name_Mat”
Blender Scene
It would also be interesting to have a Blender scene with every model. Each model has to have their origin point properly positioned in the base.
Transforms like the Scale & Rotation must be applied:
Export models to .FBX
Once we have all models ready with everything correctly applied, we can start exporting each model to FBX. Simply go to the Export → FBX tab. Make sure that you check the Selected Objects and Apply Transform check boxes.
Import assets & materials to Unity
With every model exported it’s time to import them to Unity. We just have to drag the .FBX file into a new project.
If we see that there is no material created, we'll have to, and name it correctly: Create → Material → Name. We will have to attach the albedo texture to the material.
Finally, we’ll need to attach the material properly to the model. Follow the steps in the video and you're done.
Making the visual presentation
The last step is to find an attractive way to display our assets. We do it in the following way: we make a model and a diorama and put them in the same scene.
In the mock-up layout, we place the larger assets at the back and the smaller ones at the front, so we will highlight every object properly.
In the diorama the objects will be placed as in the original project. This way the modular objects will be placed in their original context. We all know that it is difficult to appreciate a wall just thrown in a model, so in the diorama we put it where it belongs.
Conclusion
As we have already seen, making the 3D assets of our projects ready and presentable for everyone to use is not an overly complicated task.
You simply have to take into account a series of technical steps and offer an attractive visual presentation.
If you still want to know more about our Open Source initiative, take a look at our GitHub and Sketchfab profiles and start downloading lots of dope 3D objects and scenarios for free.
