buying meshes?

Rockley Bonner

I know this is contraversial but from what I hear, somtimes its cheaper to buy meshes and then edit them, which saves time, and an artist that you would have to hire to make it from scratch.

Which brings me to my point, does anyone here buy meshes, and if so where?

Ben Apuna

This only works if the mesh in question is so close to exactly what you need that it requires little or no modification. Otherwise your artist ends up having to spend time "fixing" it which can often be as much time as making it from scratch in the first place. Not to mention trying to match said asset to the art style of your game which might be easy or hard, depends on your game and the asset you want to purchase.

I think (from a somewhat biased perspective) that it can be even cheaper to just hire a freelancer if all you need is a few odd meshes.

Turbosquid, and the Unity asset store come to mind as places to buy meshes. I think there was one other, but I don't remember the name of it.

Kwramm

I worked in studios where we bought characters from turbosquid as a test. but it always turned out to be more work to adapt it than making it specific for our production from scratch... either the art style doesn't fit, or the modelling is shoddy, or the texturing is, etc...

sprunghunt

This may also lead to being a legal nightmare.

These meshes will all have licencing agreements. Some of them may be complicated and not allow you to use the meshes in the way you want. And the only way to be really sure you're ok is to get a lawyer to check over the agreements. This can be costly and more trouble than the mesh is worth.

Ben Apuna

Even worse, imagine you're about to ship a game using many awesome purchased meshes and you get notice from the store saying all the meshes were stolen from somewhere and the original owner wants all copies deleted immediately.

With all the art theft going on I could easily see that scenario playing out with some poor indie developer trying to save some money or time.

jadin

Ben Apuna wrote: »

Even worse, imagine you're about to ship a game using many awesome purchased meshes and you get notice from the store saying all the meshes were stolen from somewhere and the original owner wants all copies deleted immediately.

With all the art theft going on I could easily see that scenario playing out with some poor indie developer trying to save some money or time.

heh, that's exactly what I was going to say too seeing as how I'm raging against an mesh thieves right now myself.

gsokol

We end up buying stuff from turbosquid rather often. I'm really not a fan...70 percent of the time the models are absolute shit.

A lot of the time we end up purchasing high poly vehicle models. Had the most luck with vehicles so far. If we pay $150 bucks or something, it ends up being cheaper than having one of us spend a few days building it. So we end up doing a low poly around it and baking from it, or optimizing it, or whatever.

As an artist I hate buying models from people, but it does save money most of the time and gives us more time to focus on other work.