What do you expect from 3d model game assets?

General
1

To start the topic, lets say it’s a 3d game model of a character or creature.

1: How many polygons do you expect from it?
2: Is it OK to not be animated. Just for saying, I can do animations too, but I think it would be better fit for a game developer to do their own. It would be rigged of course.
3: Is the high poly sculpting of the character wanted? Because of this, I think the developer would want to make their own textures from the high rez.
4: Is there certain texture size wanted?

I have decided to not do games, but game art. But, there is something I don’t know. What do the game developers want? The Indie game market is expected to grow and keep growing. With this number of developers game assets are wanted?

My niche is character and creatures. Both good and evil.

2

The higher the polygon count, the more likely someone is going to want something bespoke.

If someone is buying models, then they aren’t going to know how to animate them. That means they have to rely on Mixamo. You will likely sell more if your models are animated.

An indie developer buying a model isn’t going to know any more about texturing than they do about rigging and animating.

Take a look at the Unity and Unreal stores and see what’s popular.

There aren’t a lot of options for creatures out there for Godot. There are plenty for humanoids. You’d be better off making creatures.

I’d recommend some low poly and high poly and see what sells, but I’d guess low poly is going to be more popular.

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3

Depends on the character type, style, and more.

  1. If the game is AAA style, then around 60k~120k polygons are great, but if it’s a low-poly style game, then around 5k~15k is acceptable. There are many models that look simple but have 200k+ polygons… I remember I downloaded a cool Porsche, but then I put it in Godot,Godot crashed because the Porsche had over 4M+ triangles… like why??? I liked it : (

  2. The character should be animated, because lazy devs don’t like to spend hours animating… and animations from Mixamo and any 3rd-party site suck. The animations make games feel cheap, so why animate when a pro artist can? : )

  3. I don’t know about textures much…

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And then there is the market you get them from? Looks like only platform I would be able to list and sell models on , could be CGTrader?

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5

Itch.io is great if you put different types of characters.

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I personally wouldn’t call devs who outsource help from specialists (most of us) “lazy”. Gaining skills in illustration, 3D modeling, animation, etc, takes a REALLY long time. Let alone be enough to make them quality work.

Most of the time, the opportunity cost is too great to pursue something out of your specialty. We have jobs, relationships, hobbies, and more to manage along with our development journeys.

Those hours of learning how to animate could be spent much more practically.

If you do EVERYTHING, you end up doing NOTHING.

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