If you use the unity engine at some point you'll likely want to look at the asset store. There are some great assets on there and they can greatly save you time. I do think the game development community is small here on steemit so far, but I thought I'd try this out.

This post is intended to bring to your awareness some really useful assets.

They can be purchased at https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/
There is also a side location that can tell you about some sales: http://www.assetstoredeals.com/

If you haven't gotten into game development and you want to. There are a lot of free engines that would be a good place to start. I predominantly work with Unity, but Unreal, Cryengine, and Amazon Lumberyard (uses Cryengine) are definitely worth having a look at. There are others, but those are the big ones. You can get unity here: https://unity3d.com/get-unity/download

If you need to know some basic tutorials there are tons of them on the official site. If you are looking for something specific let me know.

Terrain

If you are getting into 3D then you may at some point be considering terrain. The built in Unity terrain system is powerful, but if you want something that looks totally professional with the least amount of efforts you will want some tools.

Distingo

Distingo is a $15 asset that adds functionality to help you reduce the tiling effect of textures when they are viewed from a distance. It is very inexpensive for what it does and very easy to use. The effect it has on the quality of your terrain is almost instantaneous. If you want easy and inexpensive Distingo is the way to go. If you want something more powerful with even more features at about four times the cost, and more complex then consider the next product.


Click here to visit the Distingo Asset Store Page. They also have a youtube video with shows off what it can do and how to use it.

Relief Terrain Pack

Relied Terrain Pack (aka RTP) does everything that Distingo does and a lot more. It is more complex to use, more expensive, but significantly more powerful. It may be one of the best terrain shaders on the market. It is normally priced $60 on the asset store.









This shader is complex and there are many different video tutorials depending upon what you are trying to do. It can add water over things, make them appear wet if you want to turn up wetness while it is raining, it can dynamically add snow to the terrain and a lot more. It is nowhere as easy to use as Distingo, but it does a lot more.
You can go to the Relief Terrain Pack on the asset store by clicking here.

Gaia - Terrain Creation, Texturing, Population

So now that I've covered the two big assets for making your terrain textures look way better and fixing tiling, what about actually making terrains. In most cases unless you are skilled artist with the toolsets it is easy to tell a map that was hand built by raising and lowering terrain with terrain brushes, and then painting them with textures. This is how we all start. We don't quite achieve that professional look, but it doesn't look too bad. Well what if I were to tell you it is easy to achieve a professional look? There are two tools that have greatly improved building professional looking Terrain. Gaia displaced a tool called Terrain Composer when it introduced Stamping, and rules for how to pain textures. In 5 to 10 minutes you can have an amazing looking level.
This product is $39.99 on the asset store, because it recently received some impressive competition.



You can find Gaia on the asset store by clicking here.

Terrain Composer 2

For years Terrain Composer was the best terrain tool on the asset store. Then Gaia took the lead. The author of terrain composer went back to the drawing board and only recently released terrain composer 2 which seems amazing. I do own it, but I haven't had a chance to mess with it yet. It seems like potentially an amazing terrain tool and since it uses the GPU to handle everything the changes are lighting fast.
Terrain Composer 2 is $45 on the asset store at the time of this article. It is on discount. The normal price is $85.



You can find Terrain Composer 2 on the asset store by clicking here. Terrain Composer 2 integrates nicely with Relief Terrain Pack if you own it.

Interior and Exterior structures

There are some truly wonderful assets for building houses, dungeons, caves, and more. Many of these are worth owning. There is however, one tool that can fill the gap with these things and as long as you have some good textures you can build many of these things yourself.

ProBuilder Advanced

This is one of the greatest unity assets I have purchases. It is pricey so I avoided it and bought a lot of modular asset packs for buildings and dungeons and such. I didn't try to use this for awhile and I happened to purchase it when it was on sale. As I learned to use this I found that I did not need most of those other asset packs. All I really needed was some good textures and most of the things like dungeons I could build with a lot more freedom using this tool. It truly is a wonderful tool. This can be used to build internal levels, or it could be used to build external structures like buildings. It is easy to flip back and forth between them.
It is priced normally $95 unless you happen to catch it during a sale like I did. All of the Procore tools are pretty good.

You can go to ProBuilder Advanced on the asset store by clicking here.

Polybrush

Polybrush is another Procore tool. It is one of their most recent. If you have ProBuilder Advanced and you are using it to make natural cave type structures or organics it is likely you'll run into a problem I did. I'd randomly yank vertices around to fake it, and it doesn't look bad, but it is not quite the cave feeling you are looking for. Polybrush kind of does the ProBuilder Advanced thing mingled with some Unity Terrain techniques and is perfect for doing things like this.
It is $65 at the moment and is in beta. It says once it is out of beta it will be $95 like ProBuilder Advanced.

If you want to check out Polybrush on the asset store you can click here.

Great modular asset packs

There are some artists who make truly great asset packs on the asset store. I am going to highlight a few that are well worth the purchase price due to quality and quantity of content.

3DForge

3DForge is one of the best asset store authors in my opinion. All of his packs are huge in content, consistent in quality, and they all flow together great. The disadvantage is that most of his stuff is best used for Fantasy and or Medieval settings games. I actually own all of his assets. I have cut some of his textures out and I often use ProBuilder (see above) with textures from 3DForge assets so that the meshes I build on the fly merge really well with his assets. There are a lot of good assets, but 3DForge is the cream of the crop for fantasy.

Village Exteriors Kit

Everything you need to build external part of medieval/fantasy villages, cities, walls, etc. A truly great product he keeps adding to. Modular walls and simple system for developing new buildings using pieces. It also features tons of blueprints/prefabs with walls and such already placed and tons of additional free ones from his website.

The textures are wisely atlased for increased performance on batching and draw calls.





You can visit the Village Exteriors Kit on the asset store by clicking here.

Village Interiors Kit

This is the pack you would likely want as a companion pack to the Village Exteriors above. With this pack you can build interiors for village houses, inns, temples, castles, shops, catacombs, crypts, tombs, and cathedrals. Those free blueprints I was talking about... there are free ones that use both the interior and exterior combined into a single blueprint. The quality is superb.
This asset is normally $60 on the asset store.








You can visit the Village Interiors Kit on the Asset Store by clicking here.

Tile a Dungeon - Sewer Kit

This is a smaller kit than the village ones, but it is well made and of the same high quality.
It normally sells for $45 on the asset store. This one has stuff so it could be used for modern, or post apocalyptic sewers as well. It also would be good for steam punk style.



To visit Tile A Dungeon - Sewer Kit on the asset store click here.

Cave Adventure Kit

This is also a smaller kit that is designed to facilitate making cave systems. This is of the same high quality and as such works well with the rest of 3D Forge assets. There are alternative cave systems that might look better (haven't tried them yet) on the asset store.
The normal price for this is $45 on the asset store.



To visit the Cave Adventure Kit on the Asset store click here.

Arctic Castle

This asset is by Sandro Tatinashvili and is not optimized as heavily as 3DForge's stuff. If you want to make a game that looks a lot like Skyrim very quickly this asset is fancy and can pull it off.
It is normally $50 on the asset store and is 4/5 stars mostly due to the fact it could be optimized better.




To visit Arctic Castle on the Unity Asset Store click here.

Conclusion

This is a test run for me to see what kind of interest there is from people for Unity related things. I am capable of technical posts, as well as reviewing a lot of assets. If there are votes and interest for this I will continue, but it does take a bit of time to put together one of these posts. If there is sufficient interest I'll consider making my own screenshots, videos, and other things to go over some Unity things.

If people post asking questions or for tips I might be able to help with those as well and they might give me inspiration for another post.