Every month Unreal runs a promotion where a number of assets from the Unreal Engine Marketplace are made available for free download. True to my promise last month, I’ve combined a new list of the free assets available for October, and will of course do so again every month going forward. These assets can range form modular gameplay systems, like this month’s NPC Optimizer plugin by Space Raccoon Game Studio, or more traditional asset packs like the EP Master Materials pack by A-Mod Studio, the Gladiator Arena Environment Kit by Denys Rutkovskyi, or the Deep Elder Caves kit by Alexander Sychov.
The advantage of these free assets is of course that unlike assets you might source from places like Sketchfab or Turbosquid, they are guaranteed to be optimized for use in Unreal Engine (and specifically Unreal Engine 5 and up)and often come with expertly designed demo-scenes using the assets and (in the case of gameplay system assets) tutorials on how they can be used in your project.
So let’s start of this month with one I didn’t tease in the top:
Dreamscape Nature: Tower – Stylized Open World Environment by Polyart Studio
Dreemscape Nature: Tower is actually part of the Dreamscapes asset pack series by Polyart Studio. This pack in particular includes a fantastic modular tower set, a customizable water and river (spline based) creator, and of course a huge demo map. These packs typically go for 20-30$, so getting it free is a great catch. And if you like them and want to build larger environments Polyart has plenty of other packs in the same style and to the same quality available to build out your world.
Deep Elder Caves by Alexander Sychov
Lush, beautiful, creepy, dark, dank and claustrophobic, the Deep Elder Caves somehow fit all six of those descriptors. Alexander Sychov has made quite a few similar kits with modular cave sets and other interiors, but for my money the Deep Elder Caves are the most unique and impressive looking of all his designs…and they used to also be the most expensive, so get it now while it’s free.
Gladiator Arena Enviroment Kit by Denys Rutkovskyi
If the first asset pack in October was stylized, and the second was dark and gritty, this one is somewhere in between. Gladiator Arena Enviroment Kit is a rich an colorful depiction of a roman (or roman-like) coliseum this architectural and environmental props pack contains over 140 3D assets with high quality PBR materials pre-configured.
EP Master Materials by A-Mod Studio
EP, short for Eye Perfection is a material collection pack specially made for Unreal with over 80 materials instances and nine master materials with fully customizable parameters. It also comes with a compact material function library so you can quickly create all manner of organic and hard surface material maps. Perhaps not as sexy as some of the fully 3D environments listed above, but a good materials are a must have in any designers toolbox and this is one of the best collections available for Unreal.
NPC Optimizator by Space Raccoon Game Studio
Full name for this one is actually ‘NPC Optimizator – automatic optimize NPC for you game’ but I decided to be a bit more charitable in the heading. Grammatical errors aside, this is a fantastic pack that lets you have hundreds of NPC’s on screen at any given time, still looking great with all the animations an behaviors you expect from modern games, but with a greatly reduced performance hit. Unreal themselves claim using this pack can increase your performance when densely populating a scene by up to six times.
Stay tuned for next month and the November free assets, I for one can’t wait to see what I get to snag next.