/3/ - 3DCG

Its pretty well known by now that most Vidya companies recycle assets to use them in various games, the diffrence is the big guys know how to do it in clever ways, so that unless your eye is trained you never know it's a clone.
How does one do this? Shaders, retexturing, retopology? I'm a solo indie dev and its simply not possible for me to create every individual character model for my game. As there are several dozen becuse its an areana shooter with extra "skins" for characters.


But the recent Pokemon sword and shield controversy has terrified the fuck out of me. Im scared to reuse anything for fear of gamers calling me "lazy" So how do I reuse my exsisting assets without being a douche?