I am also curious if there are disadvantages when you make objects to sell made with Blender or 3ds Max? I know that the game industry mainly uses 3ds Max, but Blender is free and quite popular among indie companies. Would game developers avoid what I make because I use Blender?

I did some quick googleing around, and it does look like I have had some misunderstandings with the Unity asset stores policies. If I understand correctly, if the thing sold in asset store can be imported into the project, such as sounds, models etc. then it doesn't matter if you are using free or pro version, but if you export something out of unity and then sell the stuff, you cannot mix free and pro version things? Like if something is being made with free unity, like unitypack or whatever, then being put on asset store, this cannot be used in pro version and vice versa? I guess I still might have misunderstood something.

How would something like scripts count as? You can make scripts on any text editor, but they are kind of unity specific things still. I suppose they would be just considered non-unity property.

As for free version, with Unity5 free version does include profiler as well, so you can use even profiler with free Unity nowadays.

I don't think there is any such limitation.

If you think it through, it would also be quite a bad idea to segregate your asset store audience into two seperate groups... yes, you would force your asset store devs to buy a pro license because they would else loose maybe half of their revenue... but a) Unity already gets their cut from the devs similar to what the app stores do (don't know if its 30%, but something along that lines), and b) most devs would probably not bother as they would have to make 1500$ just to pay off their initial investment.... not really a sweet deal.

So yeah, AFAIK, there is no such limitation in place. If you are registered as asset store dev and upload a unity package, it doesn't matter if you created that package in the free or pro version of unity. Actually, YOU are responsible to put any warnings into your asset store page if your asset only works with the pro version. I have seen many cases were asset devs were asked for refunds because of that, sometimes the customer just didn't read the asset store description, sometimes the description wasn't clear enough what functions of the asset ned the pro features. Most devs were happy to complete the refund.

With Unity 5 and the differences between pro and free license blurring even more, I don't think even this might be a problem down the line.

Wasn't sure about the profiler though... good to know its also available for the free license.

I am also curious if there are disadvantages when you make objects to sell made with Blender or 3ds Max? I know that the game industry mainly uses 3ds Max, but Blender is free and quite popular among indie companies. Would game developers avoid what I make because I use Blender?

Use one of the many cross-tool formats like obj, collada or fbx, and people will not care too much. If you throw a blender format file into the mix, you might actually make some people happy that want to edit your model in Blender.

Just make sure you pack in as many formats as make sense, so your customers don't have to import it into their 3D Package and export it in a different format just because you gave them a blender file when they needed an fbx.

Of course, I would expect a professional 3D modeller to make sure their exported files open up in the tools they intended for, or game engines. Make sure you have the free versions of all the important Indie game engines, blender and all other tools that people might be using (Autodesk tools are expensive, but AFAIK there is an FBX converter tool somewhere out there from Autodesk. That tool is free, so I guess if a file opens fine in that tool, it should work in 3DS Max and Maya). Make sure to import and test your models in most of them, not just one.

Many of these file types have their quirks (animations not working properly, differences in axis ordering, and so on), so you will need to learn about that too.

About having a model made in Blender vs any other tool:

Generally people don't mind, as long as they get the models not only as a blender file (some people also will not mind that). Personally,

I wouldn't mind on a model I wouldn't plan to modify down the line. Problem is, Blender is generally a good tool but has some quirks when it comes to smooth shading. Instead of using Vertex AND face normals like practically every other tool out there, blender only saves face normals and approximates the vertex normals every time you change something on the models... that works fine enough (even though in some cases the shading is somewhat strange on low poly assets), but that means that Blender has to use a different method for sharp edges... instead of splitting the vertex normal into two, Blender will instead split the edge into two, doubling the vertex count for that edge.

Now, I just guess the exporter scripts convert that quirky way of handling smooth shading and sharp edges to what other tools like Maya or 3DS Max do... still, I personally would take the blender file and open it in blender for modification even though I might prefer Maya over Blender just to make sure that there is no conflict because of weird vertex data created by the converter script that might not be visible at first, but might still hamper any tries to modify the file outside of blender.

But that is a minor niggle.... just start with Blender, and if somewhere down the road you or your customers are no longer happy with blender / with your blender created files, you always can move to a different tool. There are many out there, not many free ones as complete as blender, but at some point you might want to branch out to using more specialized tools in your pipeline anway (ZBrush, 3D Coat, Mudbox, MoI, Houdini,...), so instead of seeing Blender as the end all and be all of 3D Modelling, see it as your start on a long journey to become a good 3D modeller... maybe you will stay with Blender to the end, maybe you find a different tool that works better for you....

I am also curious if there are disadvantages when you make objects to sell made with Blender or 3ds Max? I know that the game industry mainly uses 3ds Max, but Blender is free and quite popular among indie companies. Would game developers avoid what I make because I use Blender?

No difference whatsoever. A game developer wouldn't be able to tell from your finished asset what content creation software you have used. The only difference between the quality of game assets produced by 3dsMax, Blender or Mays the only difference is the tools user interface and workflow.

I am also curious if there are disadvantages when you make objects to sell made with Blender or 3ds Max? I know that the game industry mainly uses 3ds Max, but Blender is free and quite popular among indie companies. Would game developers avoid what I make because I use Blender?

No difference whatsoever. A game developer wouldn't be able to tell from your finished asset what content creation software you have used. The only difference between the quality of game assets produced by 3dsMax, Blender or Mays the only difference is the tools user interface and workflow.

V nice, thank you. I will stick to Blender without worry in this case :) .

V nice, thank you. I will stick to Blender without worry in this case .

Just remember the limitations of Blender I described above (missing vertex normals, thus smooth shading and sharp edge limitations)... this might become important:

1) when trying to import models from different tools to blender

2) when using a wonky exporter script to obj or fbx that doesn't handle the conversion correctly (never had a problem with the standart exporters though)

3) when trying to smooth shade a low poly asset (because the vertex normal is always set automatically, the angle might be off, leading to weird shading... in other tools you can manually set the angle of the vertex normal (or if you use a sculpting tool, it will be done automatically for you upon baking to the low oply asset), thus correcting these issues)

Give Blender a spin, see if it works for you...

I personally dropped Blender as my polymodeller and instead picked up Maya LT because I couldn't import my 3D Coat sculpted models to Blender without blender completly overwriting the vertex normals, thus messing up the smooth shading. There is an obscure script to save the vertex normals on import, but nobody knows if this is still working.

In the end I now pay 30 bucks a month for a polymodeller with an UI just as messed up as Blenders, in a way, but at least I can duplicate meshparts and correct pivot points on imported models without messing up my models for good.

Of course, if you never leave Blender during your modelling pipeline, that will not be a problem for you. And the smooth shading problems might never occur to you as they are quite topology dependent (if the automatically generated vertex normal is more or less correct, shading will be fine... if not, a slight topology change (additional polygon, or moving the vertex slightly) might correct the problem)

Again, thank you very much for the detailed responses, Gian-Reto :) . I will use Blender for a while, and if I encounter the problems you mention, I will switch to something else.

Again, thank you very much for the detailed responses, Gian-Reto . I will use Blender for a while, and if I encounter the problems you mention, I will switch to something else.

Just something to keep in Mind... Blender is a fine tool, and if you know about that limitations in advance, it will NOT totally drive you mad when you run into these problems. As said, chances are you never really face them and will be happy with Blender.

Good luck with your bussiness plans and happy modelling!

Remember the reason people pay for these things:

People will pay when the 'free' versions (usually with attribution requirements) are not up to the standards they need, and the paid versions are cheaper than they could produce themselves.

For my personal projects, if I need a component to do something, and I estimate the component will take 4-8 hours to create and debug, then I see a highly-rated paid component that does exactly what I need for $5, it is cost effective for me to buy it.

The key to profit is that it must be broadly useful and be much more valuable than what I could make with my own effort. If you plan on making a part that 1000 people will buy for $5, figure you that you need to invest several thousand dollars of quality into the product.

If your asset, be it artwork or code, is not an order of magnitude more valuable to me than the cost I would pay, I will not buy it but instead invest in something that is either a better product than yours or build it custom for myself.

What you say makes perfect sense, frob, thank you. Making 5$ per sale after 4-8 hours of work sounds pretty good for me .

What you say makes perfect sense, frob, thank you. Making 5$ per sale after 4-8 hours of work sounds pretty good for me .

I'm thinking you didn't read what I wrote, or there was a communication error.

Either that, or you routinely write code worth over a thousand dollars per hour.

If I can do it myself in 4-8 hours, then my own personal value on it would be a few hundred dollars. But to reach that state of general purpose usefulness it will require much more effort. It will need to be vetted against a large number of different uses, become a little generalized or have multiple useful specializations.

That would take multiple weeks of development time to create the component. So 80, 100, 120, or more hours for the component developer. Not 4-8 hours, especially if you are planning to make money on it.

The component needs to be worth several thousand dollars equivalent for me to pay for the component. In other words, on a personal project, something I could write over the course of multiple weeks of full-time effort I would instead be willing to shell out a few dollars for.