Digital Gift Ideas for Coming Holidays

Christmas and New Year Holidays are coming, and this means that it’s high time to think about gifts for your friends. In today’s list, we’ve suggested great assets that might bring joy to your mates enthusiastic about art and game dev.

VEA Games River Tool for UE4

Ultimate River Tool by VEA Games is a powerful and easy component for Unreal Engine 4 that allows you to make rivers with automatic flow-map UV warping, cascades, and interactions with physical objects. The asset helps to create complex and visually interesting river configurations optimized for the scenes, so it will be a great gift for your friends who are into environment art.

Some of the main features include:

• Spline-based River & Cascade River Tools
• Interactions with physical objects (buoyancy)
• Automatic and custom foam and opacity painting
• Realistic water shader (distortion, reflection, caustics)
• Customizable for any type of river (slow, fast, wide, narrow, etc.)
• Different shaders variations (opaque ransclucent essellated ondistancefield)
• Parametric Wet Stones
• and more

Read the full overview here.

GPU Instancer for Unity

For those who struggle with optimizing vast scenes with numerous objects and aren’t crazy about compute shaders and GPU infrastructure, might be glad to try this asset out. GPU Instancer is an out of the box solution to highly improve performance by instancing prefabs, terrain details, and trees.

Some of the main features include:

• VR compatible. Works with both single pass and multipass rendering modes
• Mobile compatible. Works with both iOS and Android
• GPU frustum & occlusion culling
• Supports HDRP and LWRP render pipelines
• Multiple sub-meshes support
• and more

Realistic Explosions Pack for Unity

A festive pack for effect lovers who are going to explode with joy once they get their hands on it. High-quality, optimized and easy to use, these explosion effects will be a fun and valuable package to play with. The pack includes 13 prefabs of 2D billboarded explosions and 13 prefabs of pseudo-3D explosions.

Mech Constructor for Unity

For the fans of mechs, any of the Mech Constructors would be a pleasant surprise that will make them dive into creative experiments right away. The packages contain prefabs of different modules that help to create various combinations of animated mechs and vehicles ready to fight!

Mech Constructor: Assault Mech (Animated) by Slava Z. on Sketchfab

Also, there are more additions to this package, and you can gather the full collection of Light & Medium Mech, Heavy Mech, Spiders & Tanks, Humanoids, and Turrets.

Corgi Engine – 2D + 2.5D Platformer for Unity

Corgi Engine is an awesome platformer solution for your friends who dream of making their own small game! Packed with features and being constantly updated, it’s a good point to start one’s path of the game developer or simply create a nice platformer or run&gun game for fun.

Some of the main features include:

• The tool is packed with content: more than 30 demo levels, 300+ ready to use, handcrafted visual assets, 200+ optimized scripts, and tons of prefabs
• Includes the Inventory Engine and complete inventory management solution
• Advanced AI system: create a complex enemy, boss, or friendly AIs behaviors by combining actions and decisions
• Everything you need to create your levels: gravity zones and points, moving platforms, jumpers, cannons, destructible crates, trees, keys, and chest/doors, ladders, wind, water bodies, ice, treadmills, mud, one-way levels, and more
• Dialogue engine: a basic yet robust dialogue system, to add life to your NPCs

WorldComposer for Unity

WorldComposer is a tool that will allow you to extract heightmap data and satellite images from the real world and create high-resolution real-world terrains quickly. The asset also includes a shadow removal algorithm that removes shadows from the satellite images in order to receive a more precise result. The asset would be a nice addition to the tools of the environment artists with a slant to realism.

Some of the main features:

• Elevation Heightmaps resolution of max 10 meters per pixel
• Satellite images resolution of max 0.25 meters per pixel. Jpg/png/raw format supported
• 3 different satellite images types, Aerial, Aerial with labels and roads
• Combine and split raw images
• Global coverage
• Content aware fill to remove shadows, snow, etc. from combined raw images
• and more