Build the Train Set you were Never Allowed to with this Simple Trains pack for Unity
Trains have always been fascinating to me. Did you know modern diesal-electric trains have basically their own electical powerplant built in? Absolutely fascinating stuff and it was with that relatively useless piece of information in my brain that the train pack caught my eye.
I try not to review assets by developers that I have already covered, there is a lot of good work out there to be looked at on the marketplaces and I do not care to show any sort of favoritism.
That said, the train pack looked cute and I honestly wanted to play with some trains and see what they had to offer. This pack is cheaper than the other one I reviewed, the polygon adventure pack. It is smaller as well but I think it has plenty to offer regardless of that.
Not joking whenever they titled it Simple Trains, at least when it comes to this hierarchy. It clearly has less going on than the previously covered pack and the folder layout shows that. Easy to parse, easy to navigate and no complaints from me whenever I dove into it.
The same setup that we explored before, the kit utilizes a simple texture bitmap that allows your to select color or design via UV coordinates. Simply squeeze whatever UVs you want colored a specific way into the correct spot and you are done.
This one is different from the Adventure pack in that there are much more in the way of unique details that you have to account for. WIndows and doors and signs. For this they just create the mesh and than make sure that the UVs line up exactly with it. You need to be careful with this because there does not seem to be any buffer space between the edges of the detail portions of the material and the background of the UV.
The materials have a nice simplistic look. Nothing really stands out except that the windows seem slightly off. I am not sure what is wrong about them but it may be that the resolution of the texture is creating some pixelation along the edges between the grey and white that jar with the hard color contrasts of the rest of the pack.
The meshes and Materials are even more basic than the Adventure Pack, hard to do but here we are. The Simple of this pack is at this stage for sure.
The developer does a lot with a little however. There is never a point where I am trying to figure out what an object is, everything fills the little “thing” shaped hole in my brain that it is supposed to. You are not going to be able to tell many complex stories with the materials themselves on this one but with broad strokes and some clever narrative devices this pack can still work wonders I think.
You could probably legitimately create a whole city builder type of game from the various asset packs that this developer has for sale. It would be an interesting experiment to see if you could utilize all of the assets for say, the rails and roads here and create a pseudo-procedural building system like you would see in Cities Skylines or SimCity.
This pack is well put together and as cohesive as the other pack from this developer that I looked over. You could easily mix aspects of the two packs and I am sure many of their other stylized/low poly packs.
The price of this pack is actually lower than I would say its value. Definitely worth picking up if you have some work that lines up with this aesthetic.
This creator has a ton of other assets, check em out!
Some Pros to force your hand
- Well organized, well assembled.
- Cohesive, everything fits together and can mesh with other packs of the same developer with little work.
Some cons to take away.
- Extremely simple, not a lot of mesh or material detail to work with.
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