Just bought Unity.. I have 30 days to choose a "free" asset.. recommendations please?

So I just go unity and I have 30 days to choose an "free" asset and I would like some advise on what might be a good choice speaking to the future.

For reference I am a old hobby game maker that is migrating from AGS (adventure game studio) and looking to continue with point and click style stuff... probably 2.5D or 2D.

These are the ones on offer...

• Amplify Shader Editor
• Odin - Inspector and Serializer
• Behavior Designer - Behavior Trees for Everyone
• Gaia
• UMotion Pro - Animation Editor
• PuppetMaster

I think I can scratch UMotion and PuppetMaster. I own 3dsMax and Modo so I think I do not need a internal 3d animation system. Also a ragdoll thing isn't something I can see myself needing.

I am leaning to Behavior Designer... though I think this may be over kill. Basically I have some idea (not sure how to implement in Unity yet) but the idea is a system that simulates personalities for my NPCs to handle conversations. The code was something i have been tinkering in c++ and a cursory look at the store page looks like I could rebuild it, maybe even better in this plugin.

Odin looks interesting... but this is what this thread is for.. I do not really understand what it is.

Gaia.. is also the same.. I am not sure what this is exactly.

Amplify Shader Editor is the other one that I think could be a go. Anything I create in 3D will need a shader of some sort. I am so new to unity I am unawear of how shades made in say modo or max might translate. It seem to me that a robust shader system would be a good "for the future" type thing, as even though my direct plans are for 2D.. any 3d project would require shaders... right?

Anyway.. what are your thoughts on these?

 

I own all of them.

Odin is an interesting one. It provides a much better inspector than you can find in unity (in general) with a lot of cool feature. On the top of this, it is capable of serialize some data, even run-time, but I've never used this features.

Gaia is for making cool 3D terrains: http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/
Very mature asset, reasonably easy to use. You can have very good terrains in minutes once you learned how to use it properly.

You either dropped the others or you understand what they are so I won't go in the details about them. You really can't choose wrong with either of these, all of them are mature, very respected plugins.

 

One major advantage of modern game engines (Unity, Unreal, CryEngine) is that they allow you to extend their editors with additional functionality, but the process you need to go through to do it is rather complicated and tedious. Odin makes this whole process far easier.

That said you don't need to make your own custom editors to take advantage of it. Odin comes with multiple premade editors that replace the ones Unity already supports (eg list support in the Inspector) as well as provides new ones that Unity doesn't (eg dictionary support in the Inspector) that are both easier to work with and far more powerful.

I highly recommend you take the time to look over the features page.

https://sirenix.net/odininspector

 

You'd probably need Amplify more.

 

Gaia is very nice. If none of the offers excite you, this is the easy #1 pick. Also check out other assets from the same author, and the related texture stuff it's compatible with. If you're likely to need a lot of overland terrain it's a definite must have. Terrains may get upgrades, but this asset is going to grow along with them, so this is a safe long-term bet.

Behavior Designer can be useful in almost any sort of game. RTS units or enemies and team mates in a shooter are typical examples, and you probably could make it work for weirder things with a little imagination. It's basically just code - very tightly optimised, allocation-efficient code, and is likely to keep working in future engine versions.

Puppet Master would be great for fancy animations, but is best coupled with Final IK, so there's a small chain of purchases before I'd be satisfied. Supports both legacy and new animations, so the author is likely to keep updating it if anything major changes with animation in Unity.

Amplify is very nice for shader creation, but UT's own tech is starting to shape up. Buy it if you need to get going with visual shader creation RIGHT NOW, as it even supports the new SRP stuff, or skip it for now and wait to see what the built-in solutions ends up looking like. It's currently far ahead of the native editor, but it's the tool which is likely to have the shortest lifespan of the ones on the list. We don't know how long it'll take UT to catch up though

 

Then you probably didn't need to actually buy Unity... Everything a hobbyist needs is available in the free version.

 

it was only a few dollars more to buy the pro-licence and get access to all the pulralsite tutorials than it was to sign up to just the tutorials.

 

At that point it would be stupid not to go for the subscription, yeah

 

Thanks for all your input guys..... here was my final thoughts and decision...

• Gaia - As far as I can tell this is a terrain generator. This doesn't appeal to me for a number of reasons. One of them is that while it makes nice looking terrain, it really looks very generic. As computer games moved into "realistic renders" a lot of the stylized cartoonish feel got lost. If the goal of an engine is to look "real" and "reality" is "reality",,, so game engines are becoming more and more alike as they are all emulating the same thing. This produces great "realistic" terrain, but realism is not something I am looking for. I think it is just not for the kind of projects I will be attempting to do.

• UMotion Pro - Pretty much what I said at the beginning. As i own 3dsMax and Modo I think that I am good using those tools to create animation for now. I may need to look into uMotion at some point if I need in scene animation and avoid animation pipelines.. but I am pretty confident I do not need this now.. and as I am a beginner I need to look at long term things.

• PuppetMaster - I can not envision a need for ragdoll simulator.

• Amplify Shader Editor - This was the one I thought I would pick. A shader system is something that will always be useful. Though as I played with Max, Modo and Substance Designer (all of which I own) I started to think that this tool is just not needed, at least for the level I am at.

• Behavior Designer - This was the other one I was thinking of. Even as a beginner I can see this having a huge amount of use. My problem here is that I am a beginner. I have worked for decades in the visual effect industry for Film and TV and one thing I have learnt over the years is that if you use a plugin to do something, it may be quicker.. but if you do not know how to achieve it without a plugin then as projects get more complex they reveal that you have huge gaps in your knowledge. I really think knowing the base systems and how it works before plugin "shortcuts" is the way to go

So all the plugins offered seemed very good quality and worthy.. it was a tough choice.. but the winner ended up being...

Odin - Inspector and Serializer

The reason why I picked this over Behaviour Designer or the Shader Editor was once it was explained to me by a guy in this thread (thanks: LurkingNinjaDev) I tried out the demo. I was extremely impressed with all the extra information in the inspector. Particularly the visualisation and visual editing of tables. This seems like a plugin that doesn't "take over" and will not stop me from learning parts of Unity.. but will allow me to better look at what I have done and understand it and edit it.

It reminded me of "VISUAL ASSIST" by whole tomato for Visual Studio. As that was something that didn't "do" anything.. it just made coding a lot easier in VisualStudio. I think Odin may be the same, as it will just make life easier without replacing techniques and stuff.

Anyway.. thanks again for all your help guys. I appreciate it!