When it comes to Unreal Engine’s marketplace, I have to admit….I’m addicted. Each month when the five free items are released, I’m there on the first Tuesday of the month like a kid at Christmas. If you know about the market place, you know the prices range from fairly cost effective (cheap) to exceptionally expensive for some of the really, really nice environments or blueprints. Now, with all that said, I’m a gamer as well, so I’ve known about the Humble Bundle for years. It’s a way to get a whole bunch of games, for a ridiculously low price, and all the money goes to charity. A few months ago, I noticed there was a software section and, low and behold, they had an Unreal Bundle. Well, the Unreal Engine Bundle has become quite popular, with this month’s (November 2023) being exceptionally good, and so I thought I would just give an example of the awesome things you can get in the Unreal Humble Bundles and why, if it’s something you’re interested in, you should be checking out on a regular basis.
HOW DOES THE HUMBLE BUNDLE WORK?
The Humble Bundle works fairly simple. Pay what you want and, depending on how much you want to pay, you’ll get a little, a little more, or all of the items included in the bundle.
You’ll also know where your donation is going to, as it’s always listed at the bottom of the project page. Now, since the bundles change every three weeks or so, it’s hard to show exactly what you’ll get, but in this article, the idea is to give you a general idea of the types of items included in a typical bundle. I’ve seen bundles that contain a ton of items for Unreal. I’ve seen bundles contain three items, but the three items contained are top of the line environments. Below is a little sample of the types of items you’ll get in the Unreal Engine Humble Bundles.
THE TYPES OF ASSETS INCLUDED
One thing that I exceptionally like about this bundle, and most of the bundles for Unreal, is that they cover all the different aspects you might need in your scenes. This bundle includes:
- Environments – Apocalyptic Hospital, High School Basketball Gym, Post Apocalyptic Mansion
- Character Animations (Ninja, Rifle Starter, Pistol Starter, Mobility, Zombie)
- Characters (Zombies, Decayed Soldiers, Drowned Knights)
- Procedural Elements (Trees, Foliage,
- System Blueprints (Basic Survival Attributes, Inventory Systems, Dynamic Footsteps, Swimming)
- Vehicles – Civilian Vehicles, Advanced Tans, Police and Ambulance
- Props – Roadside Blockades, Medical, Restaurant and Dive Bar, Cardboard boxes
- Music – 60 tracks (Royalty Free)
- So much more
In October 2023’s bundle, there are six environments included in the full bundle (costing a whopping $41.09 Canadian, which is about $30 US), but one of them stands out to me more than all the others.
If you know Unreal Engine, you know Meshingun Studio. They make some of the absolute top of the line environments, and one of them, The Bazaar, another environment from them, was actually included in July’s “Free for the Month” content drop (Normally over $120). Apocalyptic Hospital is included in this bundle for November 2023, and the cost of this one item alone is worth dropping your $40 Canadian for. The Apocalyptic Hospital environment on the Unreal Marketplace is over $400 for this one asset, but as you can see from the video above, it could conceivably be the environment for one level of your game.
This alongside the other six environments makes this a no brainer. Something that’s important for me to point out is that some of the assets, including the environments were not updated for Unreal 5.3 (current as of this writing), but you can always download a previous version of Unreal Engine so you can download and open the asset, and then simply save it out and open in Unreal Engine 5.3. It might not be optimized the greatest, but it works, and you can then use either the entire environment, or just parts of it in your current work.
I was also pretty excited to see that Mo-Cap Online has included over 140+ animations in this bundle, including some of the Zombie animations that I wrote about in a previous article.
THE WRAP UP
If you use Unreal Engine, You need to bookmark the Humble Bundle site, specifically for software, as they are always having awesome deals on Unreal elements, that you can get for an absolute steal. You can check out Humble’s software bundle at this link – https://www.humblebundle.com/software