Offering bitcoins for 3d animation work

[AndrewBuck]

I am the lead coder on the OpenDungeons project, which is an attempt to remake the classic Dungeon Keeper games.  In order to help both the development of the game as well as the bitcoin project I have decided to offer payments of bitcoins to people who contribute 3d animation to the project.  I have put in 200 bitcoins and one of the other developers has offered $50 which can be used to buy more btc if the supply of 200 runs out.

I am looking for 3d meshes for creatures, as well as skeletons and a basic set of animations for each.  The work does not have to be super high quality since they are just meant to be used for testing/concept development, but I will consider paying higher than the amounts listed for models which are of sufficiently high quality.

The forum post with up to date offers of what we are looking for can be found at the beginning of this thread on our forum.

http://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=790

Hopefully there will be some 3d artists here that are interested.

-Buck

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[fabianhjr]

Hey it is really cool project. I will get blender back online and see if I can at least create a great model. Does it need textures? Or just the mesh?

[AndrewBuck]

Yeah, I was counting a texture as part of the mesh.  Neither the mesh or texture need to be of finished quality, just something that works well enough so you can see what creatures are there and roughly what they should look like in the finished game.  That way we can see how everything works together before we get to far along on the individual models.

-Buck

[genjix]

As a 3D artist that payment is diddly squat for the hours put in to:
- Concept draw & research a model.
- Model the base mesh.
- Optimise the tris for a video game.
- UV unwrap a mesh optimally to maximise texture space.
- Paint a texture.
- Optionally create a bump-map & any other shader textures.
- Create an animation rig.
- Skin the model.
- Create several animations.
- Export model to a working in-game format.

You haven't thought this through very well... $50 is incredibly optimistic.

[AndrewBuck]

I am willing to pay more than that for good models as I made clear in my original post.  I am not looking for completed works, just something that has roughly the size and shape of the intended creature to allow for testing of animation speeds, onscreen size, etc.  We also need to tune how many hitpoints creatures have and what kind of damage they do and if you have models for them (even very rough ones) it makes that process much easier.  Hence I was offering something like 10 to 20 dollars per model for just a basic mesh and very rough animations (just enough to work out the timing with sounds, animation length, speed, etc).

The list you gave is an accurate list for a fully constructed model which should cost in excess of 100 dollars for a good one, however what I am looking for here is more like 3d concept art, or a mockup of what the finished game should look like.  If anyone is interested but feels the prices or approach I am offering is incorrect please let me know.

-Buck

[genjix]

Here's some old artworks I've done. These are low-poly so with more polys we could make a quality work,
http://genjix.freehostia.com/#art

How does this sound:
- Me & my sister create a concept artwork for one of your creatures listed.
- You pay $50
- If you want to continue, then we make the mesh to completion with everything over a week.
- You pay $300

Doing all these things you listed is complicated, and it's hard to go back and make changes once you proceed to the next step. Best to get it right the first time- decide on mesh sizes using boxes then on a walkspeed for walk-cycles by measurement. If you later decide to change the mesh then things like UV-unwrapping, skinning, ... will be messed up and need fixing.

It's not something like coding where you place a mesh in-game, tweak it, re-export, tweak, ... It's more like here's the constraints (size, various anim speeds, tri-count, texture sizes, ...), make a model fitting those. Then after each step you don't go back (generally).

[genjix]

BTW those models on that page are rigged/animated... I'll give them to you $25 each if you want them. However their movements are exaggerated and simplistic because they were made for a zoomed out strategy game where the meshes are seen from a far-away distance.

But the dragon and the girl have no animation/rigging.

[AndrewBuck]

Your offer of $25 for models on your page sounds like something we could do.  I am not willing to pay 300 per model at this stage because we don't even know for sure we will use all the creatures we are currently talking about so I don't want to invest too heavily into any one model yet, maybe in the future though if the game does well.  I have posted a reply over in the Open Dungeons forum to about which models I think look interesting so our other developers can look at them and see what we want.  You are welcome to jump into that thread as well if you want to participate in that discussion as well.  I think for a license we would want CC-BY-SA but I would also have to confirm that with the other developers, I don't remember what we are using for the artwork right offhand.

-Buck

[genjix]

kk. Put whatever license you wish.

svn co https://leapingcat.org/svn/jasmin/artsource
svn co https://leapingcat.org/svn/cspop/artsource/models/

Take your pick from there. Whatever you use, send me 15mm3F6bV4jRHYYzwr5jbsYLaNtx4zPutN

EDIT: Seems to be down. If so then where can I upload the 700 Mb archive to?

[AndrewBuck]

After discussing it with the other developers we have decided that we are not going to use the models on your site as they are not created as characters for the OD game and we don't want to re-use content designed for other things.  I do like your work though and think $25 would be a fair price for some of those.  The original offer still stands though if you get bored someday and feel like making one of the creatures on our wiki.

-Buck