9 answers
Answers.
Questions we had to answer to ship a pack, answered the way we would want them answered — the conclusion first, the reasoning after, and the number we actually measured rather than the number that sounds good.
Budgets & performance
Triangles, materials, draw calls, LODs.
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Do low-poly props need LODs?
Often not, and shipping them anyway can cost you more than it saves. LODs pay off on props that appear many times at varying distance, or on anything above a few thousand triangles. For a 700-triangle desk tray, the swap logic and extra memory are worse than just drawing it.
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What triangle count should a stylized low-poly prop have?
For stylized props in a modern engine, most pieces land between roughly 500 and 5,000 triangles, and the number matters far less than the material count. A 2,800-triangle desk with one material is cheaper to render than a 400-triangle desk with four.
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Why does one material matter more than triangle count?
Triangles are GPU work and modern GPUs have plenty of it. Materials are CPU work — every material switch is a draw call, and draw calls are what actually caps how many props you can put in a room. One material per asset is the single cheapest thing an asset pack can do for your frame time.
Formats & conventions
FBX, glTF, collision, scale, pivots.
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Should a game asset pack ship FBX or glTF?
Ship FBX if the pack is for Unity and Unreal, because both engines read FBX natively and FBX carries the collision and LOD naming conventions those engines look for. Ship glTF as well if you also want web, Godot or DCC-agnostic use — it is the better open format, but the engine-side conventions are weaker.
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What does real-world scale mean for game assets?
It means the mesh is authored and exported at true size in metres, so a 1.55 m desk imports as 1.55 m with no scale factor applied. It matters because physics, lighting, navmesh, character proportion and every other prop in your level are all calibrated to metres, and one mis-scaled asset breaks all of them at once.
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What is UCX_ collision and how do I set it up in an asset pack?
UCX_ is the naming convention that tells an engine importer "this child mesh is a convex collision hull, not renderable geometry". Name a convex hull UCX_MyMesh, parent it under MyMesh, export both in one FBX, and Unreal turns it into collision on import — Unity does the same with a small importer script.
Storefronts
Disclosure, submission, what a pack has to contain.
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How do you check a 3D asset pack before buying it?
Four checks take about ten minutes and tell you more than any store page. Import one asset and read its dimensions, look at the transform, look at where the pivot is, and rotate a prop to see its back. Everything else on the listing is a photograph taken from the angle the pack looks best from.
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How many props does a themed asset pack need?
About 25 is the practical floor for a stylized prop pack on the major stores, and the count matters far less than whether the set can dress a whole room without a gap. Twenty pieces that furnish a complete space beat forty that leave you shopping for a waste bin.
Craft
Style, period, the decisions that make a set read as a set.