Unreal Marketplace products for Driving Simulation

For us, one of the major benefit of using Unreal Engine is its Marketplace. It offers the ability to purchase so many products, at very reasonable prices, and that work out-of-the-box. It saved us countless amount of time and money, compared to our previous workflows. However, finding the right products for your needs is not always easy, so I thought I’d share the list of product we own, our favorites, and some comments on them.

Note before we start: I recently wrote a small script to extract the content of one’s Vault, which is what led to this article.

This article gets updated regularly as our Vault grows. New items get tagged so it’s easier to keep track of.

  • [22-08] is for the August 2022 update
  • [23-06] is for the June 2023 update
  • [24-06] is for the June 2024 update

Creators to follow

Before getting into the actual (long) list of items, I’d first like to mention a few Marketplace creators who make great products, perfect for driving or overall immersive simulation, and for which I’m always eagerly waiting their next creation. If you don’t care about the whole list of products, just check their store page and you’ll probably find something you need.

If you want road signs or road props, look no further: Der Sky has everything you need. Quality, content, low prices; it’s hard not to buy everything.

Not only does lyoshko create the best cars in the whole Marketplace, they also have a wide variety of products that are really useful, and which I often didn’t know I needed until I saw them.

Meik.W’s product aren’t the best looking you’ll find on the Marketplace, but they cover a wide range of scene elements needed for driving simulation. They’re optimized, cheap and varied, and that’s fine by me.

“Must have” products

First of all, let’s go over the must have Marketplace products for driving simulation. They mostly cover the basics: vehicles, buildings, props, actors. Once you have all that, you’re already most of the way.

Free

The Marketplace is full of free stuff, and maybe surprisingly, most of it is very high-quality. By spending literally no money, you can already go quite far.

Referred as ALS in the community, this Blueprint is super useful if you want to have pedestrians walking around your scene. No need to handle animations, layering or blendspaces, ALS does all that for you.

This is a freebie pack from RenderPeople. I tried it, and immediately decided that from then on, I wouldn’t ever worry about creating human models; I now just buy them from RenderPeople, but this free pack is a great way to get started.

Those environments are just amazing. You get high quality environments to explore and learn from; assets to reuse and kitbash.

Epic is bringing over content from TwinMotion, and I can’t wait to see what’s next, because those two are just perfect for us.

The CitySample is Epic’s internal name for The Matrix Awakens, which is not only a mind-blowing demo, but also available for free on the Marketplace. Since it’s huge (100GB), there are also dedicated products for buildings, vehicles and crowds; which is just perfect for our use case.

Want some trees? Quixel has you covered.

I didn’t play that much with this Landscape Material (I bought one before this one was free), but from what I saw, it’s just a perfect way to get started to use Landscape on your scene. Use it, and you won’t ever need to worry about creating a forest anymore, the Material will take care of it for you.

Building and vehicles. I’m not a huge fan of either of those, but hey, it’s free, so I’m not complaining.

Because we all need to send TCP messages at some point.

Makes navigating between levels much easier.

Vehicles & actors

Want to add moving things? Here are a few.

By far and large my favorite car packs, I pretty much only use those for moving vehicles. All from the same creator.

Scene

To build a realistic driving scenario, you need a realistic scene. That includes various types of buildings (residential, commercial, factories, etc.) and props.

Buildings

Road props

Misc

Ultra Dynamic Sky is the reference when it comes to sky, atmosphere and weather. Just drag it to your scene, and let the magic happen.

Tools

There are quite a few spline mesh tools on the Marketplace, but this is the one we use, and we love it. Speeds up scene creation.

Useful

Once we’ve gone over the must have, there are still quite a lot of high quality useful products on the Marketplace, that can help take your simulations to the next level.

Vehicles & actors

Characters

Scene

Buildings

Road

Props

Misc

Extra

Finally, a list of everything else that’s in our Vault and that we either used or perceive some potential future use. A bunch of it was grabbed for free during Free for the Month offers.

Vehicles

Characters

Scenes

Urban & buildings

Foliage

Atmosphere

Props

Environments

Road

Tools

Misc

Written on October 31, 2021