In the fast growing environment of the game industry, developers must adopt new methodologies as the game worlds are becoming more and more complex, video cards are more powerful and able to process a larger number of polygons per view than ever before, new technologies which enable advanced rendering are hitting the market, with all this emerging, the core units of a game world – the 3d models – are advancing too. From very low poly models with a simple texture map to complex 3d models with more than one texture map, maps for relief, shininess, glow and detail, complex shaders and a much bigger number of polygons in their composition, 3d models today are now, more than ever before, required in very large numbers and variations to compose the awesome game worlds of todays and tomorrows games.

Authoring 3d models for games is not easy, nor is it  done in an instant, unless, of course, there is a chance to find a model available for purchase that is similar to the one needed in your games world. But even that will cost money.
Unfortunately, the costs for creating 3d game assets are much bigger than the price of a 3d models available for purchase on a website, unless that price is fabulously high. This means that buying a 3d model is much more reasonable for you, as the amount of money required for doing this is significantly smaller compared to the time and money you spend if you chose to make the 3d asset.

Some sites – one of them is Turbosquid, the leading online 3d marketplace – claims that, on average, customers save over 20 hours of modeling time when they buy a 3d model. Now I don’t know what arguments they would use to back this affirmation, whether some tests were ran or something like that, but it is indisputable that making 3d models for your games is much more expensive – considering both time and money – than buying it.

Admittedly, most of the time it’s very difficult to find the perfect model, but still, it will take little time to make some adjustments to a model, definitely not as much as it takes to start developing one from the start.

As game graphics are pushed to the limits, the need for more entertainment provided through enjoyable gameplay is coming to the fore.

3D-Source was recently launched to provide a mean to deal with this situation.
It is intended to become the way to go for game graphics development, a library that will help game developers focus on what’s really important – the gameplay and the story – by providing quality resources to shorten the time spent on dealing with the graphics.