Despite the Paragon game project coming to a premature end (on April 26) due to insufficient player base, costing a fair amount of lost investment and player discontent in the process, Epic Games have distinguished themselves yet again by their altruistic endeavors, offering anyone the right to use, copy and distribute $12 Million Worth of Paragon’s assets in their own UE4 game projects, with millions more to be released through spring and summer 2018.
List of available Paragon assets
Characters: 20 Paragon Hero characters will be initially available including all skins for distinct character variants. The release also includes base meshes, thousands of textures, VFX and animation cycles, and non-union dialogue with hundreds of sound cues. The character Shinbi comes with an animation Blueprint which can be tailored to specific needs. Epic sends special thanks to OTOY and 3D Scan Store for granting permission to keep intact the high-quality character materials using their facial and body scanning technologies as part of this release.
Environments: The Paragon release includes over 1,500 environment assets created for the Agora and Monolith maps, including a sample map for developers to use and customize as desired.
More to Come: Epic will release millions of dollars worth of additional Paragon asset packs beyond the initial $12 million offering through spring and summer 2018.
Technical requirements & guidance
All of this content is now available inside the Unreal Engine Marketplace. From there you can download the Paragon packs for free and use them in your own UE4 projects, “with no strings attached”.
For those interested in importing Paragon characters into their projects, Epic recommends starting with Shinbi, who comes with an animation Blueprint. This can be used as a framework for animating the other characters in the Paragon packs. Epic is also shipping a sample map that is handy for testing and can be used as a baseline for creating more customized environments.
Visit the Paragon Asset Release forum thread for additional technical guidance on how to get started using the Paragon assets in Unreal Engine 4.