In July, I published my first asset package to the Unity Asset Store: Scarlett Riley. My intent was to slowly dip my toes into asset sales by starting with a lightweight character model for a low price point.
In that sense, I’d say my objectives were met. The package was approved for sale and I was relatively content with the handful of sales I made.
But I'll be honest: Even though Scarlett was published and actively for sale, I wasn't completely happy with the character as a package.
I worked on a different model for several weeks before I felt ready to revisit the character. My original to-do list looked like this:
Refine the textures
Clean up the blendshapes
Not too onerous, right? But before I even began, I received two bits of feedback from people who had purchased the first version. One of them wanted better compatibility with the Unity LWRP, and the other wanted guidance on using the blendshapes in their project.
So I added to my to-do list. And because I was revisiting the textures, why shouldn’t I provide more? And because I was going to be cleaning up the blendshapes, why wouldn’t I do a complete mesh rebuild? And if I was rebuilding the mesh, why not add some customization?
On and on it went until my original to-do list ended up like this:
Overhaul the whole damn thing.
So I did. I started by carefully building a new mesh with much better shape groups and then altering it to allow for a second outfit and a choice of three hairstyles. It was tedious, but I already felt better about the package.
Texturing took me longer than I had anticipated. While the clothing and skin came together relatively smoothly through my usual Substance Painter/Photoshop pipeline, my new hairstyles needed to have a stylized, toonish look that I simply couldn’t achieve this way. That meant painting each hair texture by hand.
I was feeling good at this point. I had my rebuilt meshes and their shiny new textures – a treasure trove of mix and match options that made me really happy. At least, it made me really happy with the content. What did NOT make me really happy was figuring out a way to present everything in a cohesive way in a Unity Package. In total, I had created the following:
Outfit 1: Full body outfit (4 material options)
Outfit 2: Strapless shorts outfit (5 material options)
Hairstyle 1: High ponytail (7 material options)
Hairstyle 2: Short bob (7 material options)
Hairstyle 3: Long ponytail (6 material options)
Eyes (3 material options)
Skin (2 material options)
I don’t even know the possible combination total on that and I am not about to try to do the math. What I knew was that I wouldn’t be able to show it all in a good way. I needed to be selective and extremely efficient when it came to including the blendshape clips I had promised.
The entire process took more hours than I want to say. But in the end I got to a good place. I was even able to include an idle and walk cycle for this version – something that hadn’t been included in the animation-free first version of Scarlett.
The update version is now live and available here