Green Stash Mesh Plants

As graphic cards, game engines and mobile platform capabilities evolve, so must natural detail. That’s why we’re especially thrilled about 3DAttack’s mesh plant package, Green Stash Mesh Plants, now on the Asset Store. With 3-4 level of detail meshes, the highest levels of detail are entirely mesh: not a transparent texture on a quad among them. While the lower poly LODs have conventional quad leaves, the highest versions are glorious mesh reproductions of existing species of appealing plant life. With Green Stash, 3DAttack sets a new standard for years to come.

See for yourself!

GeoPainter

If you’re working on a terrain with Unity Terrain’s detail mesh feature, it’s not at all difficult to quickly populate a terrain environment with Green Stash plants and other detail meshes. But imagine you are working on complex mesh surfaces too.. like huge mesh boulders, mesas, middle-earth style rooftops, roads, whatever– all which should have plant life, rocks, debris and other details atop them too! What to do? Hurry to the Asset Store, get your copy of GeoPainter, and place game objects into your scene by simply painting them on! Need to make a messy pile of bricks or logs on the floor? Normally this kind of thing is surprisingly time consuming, but GeoPainter makes messes easy! Instead of manually placing each piece one by one, use GeoPainter to instantiate and position them in your scene with a single brush stroke. With built-in parameters for randomization, you can easily add chaos and irregularity for a more organic feel. While you’re at it, use GeoPainter to plant bunches and rows of great new Dexsoft vegetables in your field or garden. Just be sure to keep the crows and bugs away! One of these should do the trick!

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve reached well over 2,000 packages this month, and our customer base has expanded to over 43K registered users! Top selling developers are making over $10K+ per month, and frankly things couldn’t be more exciting. Some amazing new packages have arrived this month… Here are some of our favorites!

Multiplatform Toolkit
Owlchemy Labs, creators of the smash-hit mobile game SnuggleTruck, bring their amazing multiplatform toolkit to the Asset Store! Owlchemy’s new tool makes it easy to quickly reconfigure your project for multiple platforms with just a few quick clicks. You can easily change textures, buttons, text clips, font sizes and other graphical elements to fit the various aspect ratios and performance capabilities of multiple platforms. Unity already makes cross-platform development easy enough, and if you’re armed with Owlchemy’s Multiplatform Toolkit, you’ve got everything you need to make multiplatform development a no-brainer!

RageTools
An exciting new addition to the Asset Store is Freakow’s RageTools, a collection of tools to enhance the RageSpline vector art tool. The very cool extension, Rage SVG-In allows you to directly import vector artwork made with Inkscape and Adobe Illustrator™ into Unity for immediate use! RageTools also brings RageSpline group management, pivot point adjustments, canvas alignment tools, and a brilliant LOD system to control anti-aliasing and curve smoothness in runtime.

Substances
Substance abuse is rampant in the Unity developer community, as Allegorithmic’s  dynamic material integration gains more and more popularity among Unity users.  You’ll find over 600 tweakable, space-saving Allegorithmic substances on the store, as well as the powerful Bitmap2Material tool– check out the free trial version first.  The 18 Free Substances Pack is a great way to familiarize yourself with this time and space saving technology.  We’ve got a couple of very popular example products up on the store, including the Airstream Demo and Pimp Your Hooligan example projects.  Get hooked on Substances today!

uScript, Playmaker and Antares Universe
The latest contender to the visual, node-based scripting tool arena, uScript from Detox Studios is the way to create game logic without writing a single line of code.   The uScript editor integrates nicely into the Unity editor environment, for a basically seamless development experience!  Our other two popular visual scripting toolkits, Playmaker and Antares Universe, are also incredibly popular, five-star solutions.

Other noteworthy additions to the store include Dynamic Elements Effects Pack, from Kalamona, which brings over thirty top-quality RPG-style spell and magic effects to Unity.  You’ll find even more AAA environments and characters rolling in from the incredibly prolific Dexsoft, and run, don’t walk, to get the free Strumpy Shader Editor– the tool so cool we had to hunt down and hire its developer!  We’ve also added new high quality music from one of Hollywood’s biggest production music houses, APM Music!

The Unity Asset Store is always on the lookout for great new content.  We’ve even expanded our team to actively hunt down and scout out top quality assets. We offer content sellers a 70/30% rev share split (you get the 70%) and monthly payouts by PayPal, with no transaction fee, either!  Some content sellers have earned so much that they quit their day jobs to focus exclusively on the Asset Store, while some smaller sellers make enough on the side to buy videogames, motorcycles, pizza and beer. Top seller or not, nearly all of them have had a great time bringing their creations to the Unity developer community.  Got what it takes?  We’re picky, but send us your stuff!

The recent release of 3.4 brought many awesome new features to Unity.. with it came a ton of new assets and optimizations to the Unity Asset Store! Here’s a quick look at recent and notable additions to the store.  If you haven’t been to the Unity Asset Store before, you’ll find it inside Unity– just launch Unity and select Window > Asset Store.  It’s an incredibly convenient way to find quality, ready-to-use, royalty-free models, scripts, sound effects, music and editor extensions right in your workspace.  It couldn’t be easier!

Addicted to Substances

Airstream Substance demo project

A mind-blowingly useful new feature in Unity 3.4 is the integration of the dynamic texture generation system, the Allegorithmic Substance engine, directly inside Unity.  If you’re not yet familiar with Substances, you should check them out, as they’re the most efficient way to pack tons of complex textures (with diffuse, specular, normal maps and more) into a very, very small footprint!  You can actually adjust an Allegorithmic Substance’s parameters in run-time with code or even animation keyframes, to create living, dynamic textures which can change over time in your game.   To get started, you’ll need to pick up a pre-existing, incredibly-customizable substance from the Asset Store, which contains the basic procedural patterns for your textures.  Use them like any material on your mesh objects and adjust the parameters as you like!

You will find over 500 pre-made Allegorithmic Substance on the Asset Store, ranging from commonly used textures including metals, woods, sci-fi and fabric, to vivid, organic and alien textures.   Allegorithmic’s system is so addictive, if you’re not careful you might become a substance abuser!  Allegorithmic’s substances can be found in the Materials & Textures section of the Asset Store.  It’s a great way to beef up your project.

We have a free 18-substance pack on the Asset Store as well as a two great example projects to get you going.

Rain{one}

Rain{one} AI behavior tree by Rival{theory}

Popular on the Asset Store this month is the very brainy AI system, Rain{one} from the Los Alamos thinktank, Rival{theory}.  It’s the easiest way to give in-game characters core AI capabilities such as the ability to sense the world, navigate, and create complex behaviors through goal or task based logic. Features include…

1. Pathfinding, Pathfollowing and Path Graph Generation
2. Behavior Trees and Goal Oriented Behaviors
3. Movement & Locomotion
4. Environment Sensors
5. One-Click AI Configuration

It’s a great way to give your zombies some braaaains.

Nature!

Nature Pack

Imagine.. the serenity of soaring trees, blooming wildflowers, the graceful curves of a fern, clouds, the majesty of a stony cliff. A verdant, rolling landscape.  There are many places to find such natural beauty… like Yosemite, the Swiss Alps, and the Unity Asset Store.  Quite popular this month is the comprehensive and well-crafted Nature Pack, which has over 30 trees and bushes, stones, natural textures and more, all prepared for use with Unity’s Terrain System.  You’ll also find mushrooms, wildflowers and trees of many species.

Free tunes from the folks at AudioDraft

The good people at the music crowd-sourcing company, AudioDraft, have recently added three packages of high-production, cost-free and royalty free music for the Asset Store.  Check out their Arcade, Orchestral, and Space themed music packs!

Improved Performance and UI

You might have noticed that the Asset Store has a new look, with a category tree hierarchy system, making it a cinch to find what you’re looking for, or just to browse casually.  There’s also speed optimization and purchase data caching for an easier shopping experience.

Content creators making a bundle!

Last month marked the most recent payout to content creators on the Asset Store, with a couple of our sellers having each earned tens of thousands of dollars.  Distributing and selling content on the Asset Store is a great way to put your skills to work, get your vision out to the Unity community, and making money! We’re always looking for great new content to put on the Asset Store.  We’re on the lookout for great models, complete game projects, editor extensions and tools, script libraries, audio and more.  If you’ve made something awesome, please send it our way!

This month’s most popular newcomer to the Unity Asset Store is without a doubt Hard Surface Shaders Pro, by Bruno Rime, which brings photo-realistic  metallic, glossy and glassy surfaces to your models.

Hard Surface Shaders Pro by Bruno Rime

This stunning set of shaders provide real-time screen-space reflection & refraction, chromatic aberration, and multiple shadows in forward rendering for a look previously achievable only by ray-tracing.  Adorable robots and grinning evil skulls love Hard Surface Shaders Pro– and we think you will too!

Also popular this month is SimplePath, by Alex Kring.  This set of simple-but-effective scripts provide an rock-solid real-time pathfinding system for NPCs and enemies.  With SimplePath, your enemies will figure out the best way around buildings, moving objects, other characters and uneven terrain surface, to hit their target.  Definitely the easiest-to-use pathfinding system I’ve seen in a long time, and the example scenes have practically everything needed to get your zombies going.

Not only will you find other top selling items, like Antares Vizio, Playmaker, or the brilliant Mixamo Animation Store, you’ll find hundreds of different models, textures, tutorials and audio tracks, all guaranteed to work perfectly with Unity, royalty free! There’s weird, wacky, and wonderful creatures. Planes, trains, and automobiles.  Heroes. Heroines.  Buildings and props for nearly any game setting.  And if you’re a modeller, coder, pixel wrangler, sound designer or other talented and prolific creator of content, we can help you sell or freely distribute your work– send it our way!

Here’s some of the newest and most notable items on the store today…

Mega-Fiers – Mesh deformations in Unity

Get bent with the most exciting new addition to the store this week, Chris West’s Mega-Fiers. Think Modifiers, except more Mega, this collection of real-time, programmatic mesh deformers is inspired by 3DSMax’s deformation modifiers. Bend, twist, taper, inflate, melt, stretch, ripple, squash, mutilate, even perform lattice deformations on meshes right inside Unity. You can animate and procedurally change deformer parameters, enabling real-time dynamic deformations during runtime.

Terrain 4 Mobile brings high quality terrains to mobile platforms. As many of you know, conventional multi-texture terrains are too computationally expensive for mobile GPUs to handle. This fantastic tool will essentially convert a standard Unity terrain normally used on a PC or console game into a high-performance terrain mesh ideal for iOS and Android, giving you the same visual effect without a performance hit.  Speaking of hits….

RageSpline – Vector Drawing in Unity

All the rage! The top-selling newcomer to the store is RageSpline, which allows conventional vector-style drawing in Unity, while at the same time adding depth and volume to your drawings, so they automatically work with Unity’s physics system.  Texture your RageSpline creations with gradients, solid colors or image textures. With RageSpline you can actually create an entire game-level’s worth of meshes and artwork entirely inside Unity. If you’re familiar with Illustrator or any other vector-drawing style art tool, you’ll find yourself right at home with this great new tool.

Playmaker: Game development without coding

Hutong Games’ Playmaker, the number one tool for making game logic without programming, continues to be the extension of choice for developers who’d rather create game logic visually.  Intuitive and user friendly, Playmaker is a great alternative to conventional programming.

Mixamo expands database and search functionality

With a growing library of animation and newly-released search system, finding the right animation in Unity has become even easier with improvements to the Mixamo store plugin.   Drag your character into the Mixamo UI right inside Unity, search through the growing archive of animations, customize and preview the actual motion in-game and purchase it on the store in just a matter of minutes.  It’s the tool your animators don’t want you to know about!

New Audio Category Reverberates the Asset Store

We’re thrilled to introduce the new Audio category, featuring high-quality, royalty-free music and sound effects.  Sound design can make or break a game, yet quality audio can be hard for the smaller developer to obtain.  Don’t settle for your friend’s Casio keyboard or take a chance with unlicensed music, when you can find quality instrumental music on the Asset Store for your game.  Sound producer AudioMicro is quickly becoming our top audio provider, with excellent royalty-free sound effects and affordable, pro-quality music, from action and adventure to mind-shredding rock!

Free Stuff Rules!

We’ve got a very large collection of free assets too– and some are quite impressive!  Top freebies this month include awesome iTween animation system, which can be used to move game objects without code, the very informative and useful C# Game Examples generously brought to you by M2H, and Strumpy Shader Editor, a powerful node-based shader editor with a quirky name.  If you’re considering making an MMO, check out the free Photon Boot Camp demo project, which includes a non-expiring 20-seat server license for Exit Games’ Photon server.

1) Create assets. 2) Sell on Asset Store. 3) Profit.

If you’ve created models, textures, audio, scripts or tools to sell or distribute for free on the Unity Asset Store, get in touch and make some bucks! The Asset Store is a great way to share with the developer community and monetize your skills.

Don’t just take our word for it, read Juha Kiili’s awesome Bragpost(tm).

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say.

No, that’s not Conan O’Brien, it’s Brady Wright, our first quarter’s top seller on the Unity Asset Store! If you’re not familiar with his products, check out EZ-GUI and Sprite Manager.

You too can win an 8′  x 2′ check and utterly perplex your bank teller! Submit your content to the Unity Asset Store!

A huge congratulations,  Brady, from all of us at Unity Technologies.

One of the most popular newcomers is NeoPax’s VIZIO, which has taken off like a rocket!  VIZIO is a node-based logic editor which will feel quite friendly to anyone who has ever used Virtools.  Their motto “Imagination + Create Art + Draw Blocks + Create the Game” pretty much sums up the workflow VIZIO brings to the Unity developer. VIZIO is the second node-based editor on the Asset Store, preceded by Hutong Games’ popular PlayMaker, another top-selling visual node-based-editor.

If the reactions on the forum and in-store reviews are any indicator, both editors appear to be quite successful already.  If you’re looking for an alternative to text-based scripting, check these two powerful new tools out!

One of my personal new favorites this month is iGui by Avam Studios, the first true WYSIWYG gui editor on the Asset Store. With iGui, you create user interfaces the visual way– dragging and placing GUI elements from the iGui toolbar directly into the game window.  It features nested containers, various alignment settings, draggable windows, drop-down menus, buttons, ready-to-go mobile slider panels and much more.  When a user interacts with these elements, it calls events which you specify right in the inspector window. Truly fantastic for UI artists, iGui allows you to create great interfaces without ever having to touch the OnGUI event in code– and if you don’t know what OnGUI means, this is UI tool for you! Once you have it, you’ll never imagine UI design in Unity without it.  It’s completely compatible with UnityGUI skins, so you can easily customize the UI style as you please–  and don’t forget, we have a growing assortment of UnityGUI Skins on the Asset Store too!

Edy's Vehicle Physics

Also on the incredibly-hot-asset-list is Edy’s Vehicle Physics, by the mysterious content provider known simply as Edy(tm).  Whoever he or she is, Edy has done a fine job creating a vehicle editing system with results which (according to some reviewers) surpass the driving experience in the GTA(tm) series. Quite a claim!  Personally I find it quite a lot of fun and relatively straightforward to create realistically behaved vehicles– from slow, lumbering, heavy school buses to slick, high performance sports cars.  Not only does it provide a great framework and editor for designing your vehicles, it also comes with four well-made prefab vehicles which you can adapt to your needs. Definitely one of the best vehicle editors on the Asset Store.  If you’re making a game with any kind of land vehicle, Edy’s Vehicle Physics is going to be a huge timesaver.

Mixamo’s in-editor plugin continues to be a popular way for animating characters right inside Unity.  Simply drag your rigged character from the Hierarchy View right into the Mixamo plugin window, you might have to do a bit of bone retargeting with a few clicks (easy), and suddenly your character is tapped into terabytes of animation data on the Mixamo database!  With some adjustment to sliders, you can procedurally adapt the animation’s movement and cadence to suit your character, right in the Unity editor, whether it’s a lumbering, slow moving giant or a little mouse!

Don’t forget– if you’re a modeler, artist, sound designer, scripter, or hardcore programmer, you can sell your content to nearly 20K registered Asset Store users.  Submit your masterpiece to the Unity Asset Store!

As you may know, the Unity editor environment is at its core incredibly extensible.  An over-arching part of the design philosophy is to allow and encourage talented developers to create new features, integrated at a level deeper than the simple plug-in architecture you find in other software.  Editor extensions can sit so tightly and integrate so directly in the environment that you might think they were new features in the tool from our own internal development team. I’m not just saying that—see for yourself! We have two new Editor Extensions in the Unity Asset Store which both radically change the Unity workflow and exemplify the power of Unity’s plug-in architecture.

First, the Mixamo Animation store plugin, which allows you to procedurally animate your character inside Unity, within minutes!  Once you’e downloaded the free plugin, you’ll find a new Mixamo pane under the Window menu item.  Drag your rigged model from the Project Pane into the Mixamo window and go through a quick retargeting process.  Once that’s in place, you can browse Mixamo’s enormous animation archive right in Unity.  Press preview and watch the animation play on your character directly in the Unity editor!  With a few sliders you can adjust various animation parameters, so that your animation perfectly suits your character’s body—no hands penetrating the head, for example.  You can make a walk surly and aggressive, or fine tune it to a quirky jog.  This is the kind of thing I myself, as an armchair animator, have slaved over in Motionbuilder for my own game.  Those days are over!  Cut your animation budget and schedule dramatically with this revolutionary new tool.  Mixamo has put up a how-to video if you’d like to get a head start.

As much of a paradigm shift as the Mixamo plug-in, the ingenious Playmaker Visual Logic editor has arrived to change the way you code!  This kind of editor is something I’ve personally wanted in our product for some time—and in true Asset Store rock star form, Huton Games beat us to it!  With Playmaker, you can visually script game logic using nodes, transition events, and access to nearly the entire Unity API  in an elegant finite state machine.

You can literally program without… er.. programming?  From simple trigger-based events to extremely complex and sophisticated gameplay behavior, you can do it with Playmaker.  Since you can augment its library of methods and actions with your own standard Unity scripts,  you can pretty much do anything with it!

Playmaker revolutionizes how you program.  Mixamo, how you animate.  Both of these new extensions offer so many powerful new features that it would practically warrant a new version number for Unity, if we had created them ourselves.  They’re here to save you time and offer you great flexibility.   To take advantage of this new power, launch the Unity Editor.  You’ll find the Asset Store listed under the Window menu.

You’ll not only find editor extensions like Playmaker and Mixamo, you’ll also find (*deep breath*) racing cars, aircraft carriers, MMO networking templates, grand pianos, animated cats, rats, wolves and horses, water buoyancy simulation systems, electronic magazines, zombies, goblins, PHP scripts, social media integration APIs, toilets, terrain tools, web serialization kits, asset bundle management tools, dragons, node-based shader editors, c# programming tutorials, Javascript to c# converters, dungeon templates, rifles, explosion and particle collections, pathfinding systems, Baroque French bath tubs and a heck of a lot more.

Over the last week, there’s been some awesome new additions which I personally find very exciting… my favorite currently being Object Cutter by Teimuraz Kokiashvili. It slices and dices meshes dynamically in runtime like a ninja wearing a suit of razorblades! Simply define an object as a cutter, another as a slice-able mesh and it produces a clean slice right where they intersect– breaking a single mesh into multiple pieces. It works and performs surprisingly well, and also features optional automatic gory effects! Perfect for dynamically slicing zombies/players/trees/giant tomatoes. Also worth noting, VisGames has been tearing up the Asset Store with some amazingly high-quality and affordable models– from trains to gravestones to.. what could be described as my ex-boyfriend’s bathroom.

EzGui by Brady Wright puts GUI elements directly in your game.

We also have a very moving announcement: the Asset Store will soon feature packs containing thousands of motion capture files, completely free and right at your fingertips! (Get it? Moving announcement?) Derived from motion capture data made available by the Carnegie Mellon Motion Capture Library and the Advanced Computing Center for Arts and Designs (ACCAD) Motion Capture Lab, this data has been converted by the amazing Jennifer Longe to a Unity-friendly FBX format and will work immediately and directly inside Unity with any Character Studio skeleton!  Thanks, Jennifer!

If you’ve never heard of the Unity Asset Store, you’ll find it right inside the Unity editor! Just choose Window > Asset Store, create an account (a few steps) and check out what we offer! If you’re a content creator and interested in submitting your work, show us what you’ve got!

We would like to thank all the wonderfully talented and creative people who have chosen to share and sell their content on the store, and developers everywhere who are using and hopefully finding meaningful benefit from the Asset Store! We’re not just here to sell models and scripts, we’re also here to create momentum and empowerment for artists, programmers, dreamers and designers who are passionate about game design.

We’ll be presenting more information in person about the Asset Store at the GDC in San Francisco– feel free to look for us there! If you have any other questions or comments, feel free to contact me! Thanks!

Press Control-9 (Windows) or Cmd-9 (OSX) to launch the Unity Asset Store browser

Wow. Over the last two weeks we’ve launched an outstanding addition of over 40 new assets ready to use in your game projects!  This brings our total number of asset store packages to over 170, and the submissions keep coming in!  Whether you need extra assets to add more detail and decor to your scene, models and animations for players and NPCs, extensions to enhance editor functionality, or a complete project to retool for your own purposes,  the Asset Store has content that will both save you time and enhance your projects. Almost everything new to the store is exciting, but there are a few especially outstanding offerings.

Mixamo Animation and Character Packs
Mixamo brings several characters and matching animation packs to the asset store.  You’ll find almost everything you’ll need for third person and NPC character action in these kits.  Most impressive, in my opinion, is their amazing Mixamo Dragon pack.  Featuring two AAA quality, rigged and animated dragons, this pack is jaw-droppingly good.   As a player character, an enemy for a boss-fight, a fantasy background character, or extreme marshmallow roaster, your game will be on fire with these stunning dragons!

Age of Sails
This pack of highly stylized, well-crafted frigates, ships and barges will work great in any RTS, sailing or pirate game, or just for packing your harbors and oceans.  They weigh in at a triangle-count low enough for usage on any mobile device, but are so well textured and modeled to look great in any platform.

Unisky
Six times Nothing (aka 000000) brings an innovative extension that I believe will be put to use in games everywhere, UniSky.  UniSky is a great solution which can generate procedurally animated skies with 24-hour day/night cycles (with moon, sun and stars), atmospheric scattering, procedural 2D clouds and parameters for weather (including precipitation!).  There’s a great demand for this functionality in all kinds of games, and no reason to reinvent the wheel– especially now that Six Times Zero has done it so well!

Other awesome packages worth checking out include…

Pacific Aircraft Pack
It’s 1943 all over again with Digital Lightbox’s highly professional Pacific Aircraft Pack.  Need a B17 Flying Fortress for your game?  How about a Nakajima Ki-43?  We got em!  Pro enough for any platform, light enough for a mobile game.   Check them out!

MultiPanel by Owlchemy Labs
The great owlchemists at Owlchemy Labs have created a wonderful time-saver–  Multipanel.  This editor extension allows you to apply common actions on multiple objects in your hierarchy at the same time– things you would normally have to do manually, including toggling, resetting, adding, removing, tagging, and more.  Just $5!

Crates – Love em, hate em, can’t live without em.
Okay. Let’s cut to the chase– we all love and hate crates.  But the inescapable fact is that you need them.  Explode them, hide behind them, push them around, drop them, and stuff them in warehouses.  Use the best ones out there– namely the crate-tastic Ultimate Crate Pack by 3D Attack.

Enrich developers, enrich yourself!
Our top sellers are making thousands of dollars a month. Got something mind-blowing, time-saving or awe-inspiring?  Submit it to the Unity Asset Store and make some money while you’re at it.  Although we’re a bit picky about quality, if you think you’ve got it, send your stuff our way!  For more information, just click here: http://unity3d.com/unity/editor/asset-store-submit

As a developer, the Unity Asset Store can save you money, time, and enable you to do things that were previously out of your reach.  Imagine the following game scenario: your warrior heroes have been adventuring through dense forest wilderness and set up camp in a clearing, sitting before a warm, crackling campfire. Distant roaring is heard! Moments later a pack of sword-wielding homicidal pirate goblins come tearing into the camp on Harley Davidson motorcycles.  With swords and battle axes swinging, your adventurers engage the pirate goblin bikers in awesome battle, dodging lasers and tire irons!  Finally you take them all down in a glorious explosion with a grenade launcher! Perfect idea for a game, right? (if you use it, I want to be in the credits -CM)

The necessary models, animation and textures seem beyond your resources? No worries!  Launch Unity and open the Asset Store window (Window > Asset Store) and find time-saving assets to get going! First you need to get your Adventurers in order. Check out Art Packages > Warriors And Commoners, by Frogames. In this best-selling package, you’ll find an assortment of configurable, professional quality, rigged and animated adventurer characters ready to go.  There are so many combinations of configurations, you find a style that suits your game uniquely. You grab our own Free Terrain Assets package, as well as Art Packages > Shanty Town Trees and artfully lay out your forest in less than an hour. A few clicks later you find the perfect campfire, by Unity Magic, complete with crackling sounds, smoke and dancing flames, saving hours of work. After clicking Download & Import, moments later your campfire is in your project and ready to use in your scene.

“But surely,” you say, “Unity does not have Pirate Biker Goblins on the Asset Store!” We look you knowingly in the eye and guide you to the Dungeon Guardians package, featuring professional quality, ready-to-go goblins. With a little texture work in Photoshop, you add classic leather biker chaps, evil mustaches and menacing eye-patches to the characters. Throw in your own peg-leg and hook-hand as meshes to complete the look. “This is unbelievably awesome!” you say, as you dive deeper and find that the battle axes, swords, and motorcycles are really just a download away. For the amazing boss-fight explosions, you download and import the stunning Detonator explosion package. Which is free, by the way.  Suddenly your project has professional quality artwork and effects in place, allowing you to focus on the important work – unleashing your creative vision upon the world!

For Content Creators, the Unity Asset Store is a fantastic way to publish, distribute and monetize your hard work – it’s a quick and effective gateway to connect with a rapidly growing base of game designers!  Because your customers can download and use assets directly in the Unity Editor,  your content is easy to purchase and immediately usable.

As of this blog posting, we’ve just released a brand new Asset Store Tools submission package. Check it out and show us what you’ve got!

Sure, the Unity Asset Store is an awesome resource for game designers and a great way to make money for content creators.  But it’s not just a place to buy and sell tanks, trees and scripts, it’s an exchange of creativity, ingenuity, and passion.  You’ll find the Asset Store waiting for you under the Window menu directly in the Unity Editor.

Rezzable brings Unity & Open Sim together.

As our resident virtual world enthusiast, I’m always on the lookout for Unity developers making progress in the field. One of the most recent and exciting examples of this is heralded by the folks at London-based Rezzable. Renowned for their highly innovative and rich environments in Second Life, Rezzable has ingeniously created a Unity based client which works with OpenSim,  an open source Second Life compatible server.  Their technology communicates directly with the OpenSim back-end to stream and rez/instantiate SL-compatible content, including its very unique prim and sculpted-prim geometry right into Unity in real time.

Rezzable is using virtual worlds to teach real world history.

Rezzable’s innovation promises to blend Unity’s powerful AAA, browser-based technology with the vast banks of virtual world data created by OpenSim and Second Life world-builders over the last 8 years. This marriage between new technology and existing content offers a continuity to virtual world developers who needn’t scrap their existing body of work in order to take advantage of Unity’s next-gen functionality.

A Monumental Milestone - Unity, Rezzable & Opensim!

Kudos to Rezzable and world-builders everywhere, working hard to bring Unity and the dream of a digital metaverse together.  Do you have any exciting news about Unity and virtual world development or applications?  Please share!

But so far, most of the Unity bloggers have focused entirely on technical subjects, road maps, and release information… and from our best brains!  But where is the completely irrelevant blogging about the Unity trampoline, my cats, what’s served for lunch at Unity, idiosyncratic server names, and the like? It’s right here!

First scoop: The Unity trampoline. Inspired by the essential-geek-startup-novel Microserfs, we got a Unity trampoline. It was briefly mentioned late one night when Joachim was bouncing restlessly between coding, and he immediately bought one online. A few days later, *VIOLA* (sic), we have a 4m diameter trampoline of death in our back yard.

Unity Tramponauts include Joe, Sam, Alex, David, Nich, me and a few other brave souls.  Joe’s mastered backflips in less than a week.   Because Unity developers are well-trampolined each day, your software is guaranteed to be robust and well-exercised.  How many other game engine developers do you know who rigorously trampoline their dev-team daily?

The Lunch Report:  As you may or may not know, Unity Technology feeds our highly-intelligent action-squad of programmers with nutritious, brain enriching lunches daily.    Most recently, however, our caterer has taken to serving fish and chicken on a daily basis.  It has been theorized that our caterer receives an enormous dump-truck every morning full of chicken.

Today’s lunch: Interestingly, fish was absent.  Mixed salad with arugula, couscous with vegetables, chickpea and chicken blend, and the standard bread with cheese.  Water and napkins were also present.