The 5 Best FREE Unity Assets, you don’t know about!

Hello Unity Traveler,

If you are reading this, you have likely stumbled here by accident, or my clever article title has wooed you into a sense of deep soothing and bliss, like settling into a warm bath after a long day of fixing bugs or collapsed vertices. In either case, it’s great to see you again. If you are unfamiliar with me, I’m John, Unity developer, Asset Publisher, Director of Software Development, Father of Four and Bearded Dragon Aficionado. I’ve been writing blogs here and there for a while and doing my best to share my Unity knowledge/know how with others. Recently, the team at Cinema Suite had asked me if I would be interested in writing a few articles for them, and at first I said no. But then they offered me a signed picture of Director Bot, and I was on the first plane to Canada.

Anyway, today I wanted to talk about some FREE assets you can get from the Unity Asset Store that will make the process of designing your game more rewarding (and certainly more cost effective). Anyone who has visited the Asset Store knows that there is jungle of content out there and it’s a time consuming ordeal to hack and slash your way through the thick of it and separate the shining gems from the, well, not so shiny ones. There are big assets, small assets, expensive assets, and you guessed it FREE assets. But instead of the boring old “here are the top 5 free assets you have seen over and over again for the last 2 years”, I want to take a different approach and point out some of the best hidden free assets that you likely don’t know about.

Why are there Free Unity Assets?

Now, before I get into the list, I want to take a moment and talk about Free assets and what they mean to you and the publishers who make them. As an asset publisher myself (UtopiaWorx Publisher Page) I can say with certainty that the creation of Free assets can be a tricky proposition. In my case I make both free and paid assets, and I tend to use my free ones as a means to introduce people to the quality of my work. Then, there are others out there who only make free stuff.

There are a few categories of Free assets on the store that you should be aware of:

• Free for the good of humanity — Assets that are made by people with great hearts who want to give back to the community.
• Free to Pro conversion — These are more trial versions to give you a taste of what the Pro version can do.
• Free because it’s old — These are assets that have outlived their shelf life and the publisher has decided to make it free.
• Level 11 — These are paid assets which have been featured on the Level 11 sale.

As an asset publisher I can tell you that Free assets are a very important part of the overall big picture of success in the Store. Generally speaking when people see that you offer both free and paid assets, they will look at the popularity of your free assets to determine if they will even bother to look at your other stuff. That being said, It’s really important to rate and review any free assets you may download, because it’s the best way you can show support for a publisher who provides free tools.

My TOP 5 list of Free Unity Assets

So, in no particular order, here is my list of the Top 5 Free Unity Assets you don’t know about!

#5 – BitStrap (Download from the BitStrap Asset Page)

BitStrap is an impressive collection of helper functions and Unity community driven goodness. It is an open source project with many contributors who have obviously taken the time to understand the needs of the Unity development cycle and solve those common headache issues we have. BitStrap touches on many common concepts in Unity such as extended Vector Math and provides some really handy extensions you can use in your code to leverage them. Many of the helper functions and classes are Static, so all you need to do is simply call them, no need to create and manage instances. Initially released in January of 2016, they have already added a nice collection of additional features. Owning up to the true nature of Open Source, they have even put the codebase up on public display Here if you would like to collaborate or contribute.

I had the chance to chat with the main developer (Matheus) from Bit Cake and he explained to me:

“What basically led me to put together all these tools was that, between projects, we kept writing some recurring boiler-plate code, or copying classes over. We decided that it’d be helpful for us if we had a centralized repository of utility.

In the middle of the process, we saw that a lot of developers also had some “recurring code” (mainly from the #unitytips Tuesday tweets). That made us think how awesome it could be if all Unity developers made use of a centralized repository for this kind of code. Better yet, if they would collaborate with the community and share their code that they think could be useful for fellow coders.

That was when we made BitStrap (BitCake’s Unity Bootstrap) publicly available. We expect to bring more joy to Unity development at the same time we expect that Unity coders will contribute their awesome tools as we see in the #unitytips tweets :)”

Download from the BitStrap Asset Page »

#4 – Memory Efficient Coroutines (Download from the MEC Asset Page)

Memory Efficient Coroutines is one of those jewels you find on the asset store that make you wonder why things are not like this in the engine in the first place. Its clever implementation of the coroutine pattern will not only save your game from poor performance and memory allocation, but the way of thinking about it is just so elegant. By default when Unity runs a coroutine, it allocates memory for each one on every frame, which as you can imagine gets very expensive if you are running more than a handful of these essential tools in the game development world. Memory Efficient Coroutines really shines here in that it challenges the core assumption about coroutines and sets a blazing fast standard for how it should be done.

Download from the MEC Asset Page »

#3 – SimpleLUT (Download Simple LUT from their Asset Store Page)

If you have not ever experimented with Look Up Textures and Color Correction, this is a great starting point. Simple LUT is an amazing “Does what it Says” kind of asset. While most of the color correction tools out there only apply existing LUTs and  do not allow you to make changes to the LUT textures at runtime, Simple LUT broke the rules and asked “why not”? Keeping true to it’s name Simple LUT offers a simple but elegant UI to manage the amount of color correction applied to your scene. The installation is super easy, and you can have a fully functioning color correction system in minutes. Since color correction is a post processing effect, you will find that Simple LUT hardly effects your scene performance at all.

With Simple LUT, you can control:

• The overall amount of the effect applied
• Hue
• Saturation
• Brightness
• Contrast
• Sharpness

I had the opportunity to speak with Jeff Johnson, the creator of this package and he explained that this asset was created because he needed a system to manage how Lookup Textures were applied and wanted to be able to tweak the properties of the colors. Necessity being the mother of invention, Simple LUT was born. Though his initial thoughts were to sell this package, he had a change of heart at the last minute and decided to gift this amazing package to us all.

Simple LUT also ships with 8 demo Lookup Textures you can play with out of the box.

Be sure to also check out the other assets he has to offer including his Procedural Lightning Toolkit and Rain Maker assets!

Download Simple LUT from their Asset Store Page »

#2 – Cinema Themes 2 (Check out Cinema Themes Here)

Since we are talking about LUTs already, how about we take a look at this generous pack of Lookup Textures provided by our friends here at Cinema Suite. I personally started using Cinema Themes the day it came out. It’s a fantastic collection of high quality LUTs that work with just about every color correction engine for Unity out there. The guys at Cinema Suite really took the time to create some useful textures that offer a wide range of color correction moods. They have also been very active in updating this pack and keeping the content fresh.

Currently packed with over 50+ LUTs this is one of those must have resources for just about any Unity project. The new version now also comes with a nice inspector tool to help you get setup. Keep an eye on this one as I know they will be making more content for this package as time goes on.

Check out Cinema Themes »

#1 – Mesh Baker (Download Mesh Baker from the Unity Asset Store)

When it comes time to move your game out of prototype phase and into actual development, one of the things you will start to focus on is performance. One of the biggest performance boosts you can get is merging meshes to boost batching and reduce draw calls. While there is an army of performance tools out there which can help, I have found Mesh Baker to be one of the better ones to get the job done. Their no nonsense approach to the concept makes this one of the best choices out there. While there are some limitations in the free version, none of them will hamper you from getting a performance boost out of your scenes.

Download Mesh Baker from the Unity Asset Store »

Thanks for reading

Well that’s it, my list of the Top 5 FREE Unity Assets you didn’t know existed. I hope that you have found some cool tools that you can strap into your tool-belt and are ready to add some speed and sparkle to your games at no additional cost to you.

I’ll catch you all next time.

John Rossitter