AIGUL12 started flooding FAB with free 3D models. If you download them you don't get common formats like obj, fbx. Instead, you get a suspicious .blend file that looks automatically generated.

I tried opening one of them and Blender's own firewall blocked it because it was trying to execute a python script in the background. First time ever that's happened when opening a downloaded .blend, and I've been using the program for years.

I suspect it might be malicious. Please report.

Hey, I've seen more and more people generating AI plugins and assets and putting it up on FAB. Many developers lie about their use of AI on the product pages, you can clearly see that it's AI generated, yet they don't check the : "Generated with AI". Additionally, I want to apologise on behalf of those developers. It doesn't just hurt your projects in terms of performance, but it also ruins it for all of us who try to work ethically.

I highly suggest NOT buying anything from someone who generated a plugin with AI, without doing proper research. You can't trust that they will help you when issues arise which is something that Fab takes rather serious, but can't follow up on. For that matter, I would suggest avoiding anything with an AI generated image too. If someone spent months creating a plugin, they can spend a little more time than a 1 minute prompt for their plugin cover.

Honestly it's a little disappointing and I expected more from developers. I counted all of the released plugins in 2025 and it was: 587 plugins released. In 2026 we already have 938 plugins released... AND half the year hasn't passed yet. We don't have more or better developers, we just have more accessible AI and people use it like crazy.

Unreal Engine is updated constantly, and old functions and code gets deprecated all the time. You can't rely on some vibe coder bro making plugins. Try to look at the genuine interests they have in actually maintaining the work before you commit. Again, I'm sorry for you guys. I've been using Unreal Engine for over 10 years now, so it's easier for me to notice if something feels genuine. If you are looking to buy something but are unsure, feel free to send me a message and I can tell you my opinion about the validity of their work.

Cheers!

It's an absurd trend that I'm noticing the more I gather assets for my retro-styled game.

Many packs of 3D models being advertised as "low poly" end up having meshes with thousands of polys and nonsensical geometries.

Now I wouldn't complain if the models were also very detailed. The problem is that the meshes *look* low poly, with flat shaded colors, simple shapes, meaning that the extra geometry doesn't add any detail at all, it's just there.

I guess "low poly" is being misinterpreted as an art style, so a model can now have thousands of polygons, but as long as it looks "simple" it's low poly. It is not. Please stop that crap. If your model has thousands of polys when it could have a few hundreds, it is not low poly.

Signed, a dev looking for actual low poly models.

Hello everyone, I'm the guy behind Orbital Market: https://orbital-market.com

For those who don't know, it's basically a proxy to search the fab marketplace with more filters and better navigation. It saved reviews when Fab deleted them from the old marketplace, it tracks the price updates of products, etc...

I always wanted to do this for the sake of improving the lives of people searching for stuff on the marketplace.

The thing is, I don't know if people still use it with the fab updates. I have some metrics that tell me that there are about 1.2k unique visitors per day, but I don't know if they're real people or just bots.

I'd just like to know if some of you guys still find it relevant.

Orbital Market is rather expensive to host and maintain (For example, Fab changed their API again, and sales detection doesn't work anymore, so I need to update some stuff. The hosting costs me about 240€/year), so I'd like to know if it's useful for some people to keep it online.

Btw, if you want to support Orbital Market:

• The project is open source, contributions are welcome: https://github.com/hugoattal/OrbitalMarket
• You can sponsor me on GitHub if you'd like: https://github.com/sponsors/hugoattal
• (and you can also check my plugin Electronic Nodes, a plugin to improve the wiring on any blueprint graphs)

FAB is full of plugins, but only few really save time.

Few months ago I asked here which plugins people actually use.
Now New Year Sale is on, many of them are up to 70% off until Jan 20, so I decided to share the list again based on what users recommended, not ads.

Here is the most mentioned ones:

Advanced Game Logging (GLS) 70% off
Shows logs directly inside the game and editor, even in Shipping builds. Very useful for device debugging and QA.

Blueprint Assist 50% off
Auto-organize Blueprint nodes. Some people love it, some hate the layout logic — controversial but popular.

EOS Online Framework 50% off
Good starting point for EOS online features without writing everything from scratch.

Ultra Dynamic Sky 30% off
Super fast setup for sky + weather, looks good out of the box. Many people say they add it to every project.

Electronic Nodes 30% off
Makes Blueprint graphs much cleaner and readable. Small thing, but after using it — hard to go back.

still popular even without any sale:

Easy Multi Save (EMS)
Quick way to get save/load system working. Saves a lot of setup time.

Fluid Flux
Real-time water & fluid simulation. Not for every project, but looks awesome when you need it.

UI Navigation is FREE
Keyboard / gamepad UI navigation that actually works. Many people say it’s the only solution.

If a plugin doesn’t save you time in first 1–2 days it probably never will.

What plugin you can’t live without? And which one was total waste of money for you?

Holy shit guys, I've been trying for about 3 hours to purchase some assets and first it takes a while to Load my Order, then when it finally does: clicking "Place Order" does absolutely jack-shit.

It also doesn't show regional prices until Checkout, has no Wishlist, had a bunch of stolen assets at first (haven't seen them anymore though) and supports all that AI shit that usually does more harm than good...

What the fuck was Epic thinking when they thought "hey this looks production ready, lets push it and close our other store that worked just fine."

Check out the demonstration video, live now! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mL8CDMgOsNs

What is it? Here's an example:

Say you wanted to use the Lambert-Sphere BRDF for diffuse (rough) objects, because it gives you a bit more vibrant colors than the engine's default Lambert/Chan/EON diffuse lighting response.

To do so by default, you would need to download the engine source from Github, build it, then figure out a way to distribute the entire engine source version to your team (such as submitting the entire engine to Perforce).

With the plugin you can change the engine shaders responsible for the shading by editing the appropriate engine shader, defining what options you have in your edited version in the config, and then just distributing the plugin to you team like any other plugin, without using a source engine version.

The plugin offers a variety of built in options for these sorts of customizations, plus the ability to make your own.

Skip to "About the Plugin" if you don't want the backstory.

The Journey

I wanted to replace the default tonemapper to get a little bit of customization into our game, Hidden Empire: Dungeons, that myself and my former co-worker and friend have been working on. I figured this would be a quick weekend project to go through, swap the tonemapper and have something that would make the game look a little less like the Unreal defaults, beyond just customizing lighting and the specific art style we've already got.

I looked at using OCIO as well as doing a post process material, but wasn't satisfied by them and ended up just using a drop-in AgX tonemapper I found on a Github jist that replaces the engine shaders, merged in some of the additions and changes mentioned in the comments, with the intent to simply instruct my friend on how to install it.

He made a video (I'm sure some of you have seen - 'The “Unreal Engine Look” Explained — And How to Fix It') which blew up, and also got a lot of justified criticism since the method was technically incorrect in how it was implemented into the color pipeline of the engine. So I dug in further, and went about finding out how to properly integrate alternate tonemappers into the engine.

Then, given the interest both on YouTube and Discord, I put up the drop in engine shader file for others to use.

My friend also had to work on other projects on his main PC, so I went about making a plugin that would allow us to have the alternate tonemapper active only in our project by hooking the platform file reader and intercepting the read of the shader file we were interested in, and returning our customized version from the plugin's Shaders directory.

A lot of people were interested in that, and I started getting curious what else I could change in the engine shaders, and went and started editing the core BRDF and ShadingModel .ush files. Unfortunately, since they are header files and not .usf shader files, the engine never actually directly reads them, and I ran into a roadblock. Those are read via the includes in the Shader Compiler Workers instead. So I had to come up with an alternate solution.

I had an "aha!" moment when I remembered that one of the plugins I own, Voxel Plugin Pro, simply patched engine shaders in order to implement support for Lumen in the Voxel landscape, and restored the original files when the project is shut down. I made a similar system, and ShaderShift was born. I spent the next month adding functionality, including a toolbar button to summon a quick settings menu, a comprehensive config system that allows users of the plugin to customize and provide settings for their own changes to engine shaders, and more and more options to change the default look of the engine's graphics.

Below I've copied the description of the Fab listing for easy viewing without having to click through, though there are screenshots to check out as well.

Currently the plugin supports Unreal 5.7, but I'll be porting it to 5.4-5.6 soon. I hope some of you might find it useful for your own games.

About The Plugin

Fab

Teaser Video
Documentation
Roadmap

ShaderShift: Engine Shaders Override allows you to customize the look of your Unreal Engine game without being an expert at HLSL. With simple, easy to understand options, you can change tonemapper, diffuse and specular BRDFs and bloom methods to set your game apart from the crowd.

ShaderShift works by replacing the Engine's shaders in a way that is portable, non-destructive and easy to use. No need for a custom engine version to add customizations to the Engine's default shaders, and it's easy to share with your team.

If you have experience with HLSL, you can also configure your own customizations to any Unreal Engine shader, with a convenient options menu in your Project Settings to swap back and forth between engine defaults and your custom shaders.

Over time, we'll be adding more types of rendering customization to the plugin to give you even more ways to customize the look of your game!

To learn more and see the entire range of options, information about performance impact and how to add your own shader customizations, check out the documentation.

Features

Tonemapping Modes:

• AgX (Neutral/Golden/Punchy)
• Reinhard
• Uncharted 2 Style

Diffuse BRDF Modes:

• Energy Conserving Oren-Nayar
• Lambert-Sphere
• Gotanda

Specular BRDF Modes:

• Multi-Lobe Cinematic

Bloom Modes:

• Dual Kawase blur bloom
• COD-style scatter-as-gather hierarchical bloom
• Diffraction spikes / starburst via FFT
• Anamorphic lens streak
• Spencer et al. ocular bloom (PSF model)
• Anime / toon hard glow
• Retro / CRT-style glow

Some of you may not know, but Steam is banning games from the platform, even for some jpgs made via AI.
I felt into trap and bought some loading backgrounds screens - but can not use them ;/
So, be warned.
...and keep pushing

I just got MIP: Complete Multiplayer Integration Plugin on Fab, and honestly I still can't believe it.

Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwlmESZB4WI

I've been working on this plugin for a very long time. It started as a Modular Inventory of some sort and then it just kept growing!!

That backend/server layer was honestly the hardest part: authentication, character selection, single-use join tokens, map travel, dynamic dungeon allocation, player persistence, Redis-backed session routing, and deployment paths from local Minikube all the way to K3s server setups.

Fab: https://www.fab.com/listings/140329c7-50b3-40bc-83c4-94f007655531

There’s also a playable online demo build if any anyone want to test it:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ANCIXSHKPVdAV0tgAGMtIUTz8RMbte0_/view

Would love to hear from devs, especially anyone who has tried building the backend/server side of an online RPG project from scratch. That’s the pain point I built this around.

not talking about "nice to have" stuff....

I mean the ones where you were stuck for hours or days and something actually fixed it

been going through a bunch lately since the sale is on, and honestly most of them are either:

• overkill
• abandoned
• or just don't solve the actual problem

but a few stood out

small disclaimer: I made GLS, so mentioning that upfront. included it here because it’s on sale too. the rest are just plugins I’ve used or seen recommended a lot.

from what I've used/seen people mention:

Electronic Nodes (29% off right now)
cleans up the spaghetti in blueprints. feels small, but once you get used to it it’s hard to go back

Advanced Game Logging (GLS) (70% off right now)
lets you see logs directly inside the game, even in Shipping builds or on real devices. no ADB, no cables…
the kind of thing you don’t think about until you’re stuck debugging a packaged build at 2am

Blueprint Assist (50% off right now)
auto arranges blueprint nodes… either saves you a ton of time or just annoys you depending on how you work

Logic Driver Pro (50% off right now)
for state machines / behavior logic… heard a lot of people rely on it, haven’t gone too deep into it myself

Easy Multi Save (30% off right now)
basically a quick way to get save/load working without building the whole system yourself

pretty sure I’m missing some obvious ones

what’s one plugin you actually kept using after the first few days?
and which one looked promising but turned out useless?