What is best way to go about getting 3D character models?

Hi,

I am a hobbyist looking for some advice here. I am building my own role-playing game prototype and am thinking of hiring someone (or more, depending on the inputs to my question) to help me create some 3D characters. Based on my limited understanding of 3D characters, after someone designs it, I still need a rigger to rig it and an animator to animate it. My questions are:

1. Should I hire someone to do all parts of this (i.e. create, rig and animate) or should I hire 3 separate persons for each part (e.g. 1 for creating, 1 for rigging,1 for animating)?

2. What are the pros and cons of these 2 options?

3. Any other thoughts on how else this can be done? I'm not keen on DIY though.

Thanks.

 

There are plenty of tutorials about all 3 of those steps. Maybe you could try doing it yourself?

 

I agree.
I was now about to say the same thing.
It's better to do it yourself.

I suggest learning both some 3d modelling and some art too.
3d modelling is not as hard as most people say it is.
It gets addicting too.

When you get good at both, you'll be surprised at how many characters and games you want to put those characters in, will pop up in your head!
Fun!

Now back to my game work!
Bye for now!

 

1/ you have same artist doing everything. You deal with only one person to do the entire character. Changes are huge that he'll be better at one of those 3 steps. It's maybe less risky to deal with issues such as not completing the job at all, or being late to deliver. You can know his availability and time frame to complete the gig.
2/ each of the person you hire should be specialized in each of those fields. You'll have to deal with 3 different people that might have retouch to the geometry, rig to suit their way of doing their job. You have 3 times more chances to have the problems explained in 1/

 

I'm always for hiring an artist.

I think that your answer is pretty evident: If you you can find one artist to do all that it would mean less juggling work, but if you need to hire more.

@Djagg , @BitGem, and @janpec are all amazing artists if you want some good leads.

 

As I'm a hobbyist myself I hope I can give you some good advice for a start.

First of all you should be sure to learn some of the basics about characters and Unity and determine as exact as possible what's your needs. For the rigging of a model, if humanoid, you can use Unity itself and for animations there's quite some good packs out there. This two things will propably already save you much money, at least for prototyping. Buying exclusive animations would cost you much more as you normally need tons of them for a rpg, so before you're not sure that you need additional animations that you still miss, you might want to know more about how it works and see what's already available. About 3d modeling it very much depends on what quality you are looking for. I for myself am searching for a more realistic aproach and therefor it's more difficult to get decent models if you can't pay serveral thousands, but for a lower quality there's some solutions available to get first characters done.

So determine for yourself how much money you have available and what quality you need. Depending on that answer it's propably a different aproach how you can progress. Also think about if you will have a single hero without many options of clothing changes or need those as well. Will it be more hack'n slay or do you have towns where you would need villagers as well. All this questions will have an effect on your aproach.

For creature art it's easier to get some decent models, just check the assetstore and click creatures, you will find some very good there and also if you take a closer look at the "Assets and Assetstore" forum section here.

 

Whatever you do, don't go to Turbosquid.

That place is an unbelievable rip-off.

 

I definitely agree with rosor about the risks of 3 separate artists. When something's broken, they'll always point fingers at the other artists. If one artist is responsible for the entire character pipeline, the buck stops there.

This is kind of DIY, but consider Mixamo Fuse or UMA 2. Mixamo is in a bit of transition right now since they were just acquired by Adobe, but Fuse is the best character creator I've come across. You just select the body type, features, and clothing, and then download a fully-rigged model. You can also buy nice quality animations from Mixamo's mocap library. It's much cheaper than hiring an artist for custom work.

Even so, I'm no Yves Saint Laurent. Unless I want all my characters in jeans and t-shirts, I personally need to get someone with some fashion sense to do the pointing and clicking in Fuse.

 

I wouldn't call it an "Unbelievable rip-off", but it definitely is NOT the first, second or even third place to go when looking for models; even if they are just placeholders while you prototype.

However, I have found some free interior models for furniture or props that work enough, and with a little tweaking on the textures OR applying better textures can render things better in the scene and look good.

However do not expect to get "good" 3-D models there.

 

I've been playing around with Maya's character generator. It's actually pretty decent! They take care of the rigging and facial rigging for you and you have the option of changing generated texture size. It doesn't make character as well as mixamo's character generator but it does a damn decent job and much cheaper than the costs of Mixamo rigger.

 

Just seen some characters made in the Char Generator @Samuel411, can you pay for a perceptual license for this? I much prefer having a perceptual license, as I don't like paying monthly sums. It looks amazing and I am already planning on getting Maya.

 

I don't think so. If you pay for Autodesk Cloud (monthly) you get all the tools from autodesk. Character Generator also has a pay as you go type of deal which is good if you don't need that many characters.

 

Daz3D is pretty good too, personally I think character modelling is probably one of the most difficult and time consuming things to get right. Plus for the cost of a decent 3D modelling app (for rigging and animating) along with Z-brush and the cost of time involved..

It seems a little bit OTT when you can create perfectly great looking char models in Daz3D or Makehuman.. For enemy types and quadrupeds I tend to do it all myself, but for bog standard humans I tend not to.

 

That depends on type of character you want to make. If it is human (or close to, like elf or dwarf), MakeHuman could do the job. You'll get both model and rig this way, but you'll have to take care about animating it yourself. If those are non-human characters (dragons, flying teapots of doom, simulated computer viruses), then you need to do all those steps by yourself or hire someone who can.

 

It takes years to learn how to model good characters. Even cartoon or stylized characters have to be appealing which means good artistic interpretation and good design. It depends on what your needs are, if you just want to make a chess piece say, then you could learn to model it and texture it, but to rig an animate will take longer. Even producing simple characters takes a lot of time so if you are a hobbyist maybe you want to spend time on other aspects of the game. You can find artists that do the entire character and also animate as well,... because they love to do it all (I am one ). I suggest using one artist for the character work because it is more efficient.

 

*That place is an unbelievable gamble if you don't know what to look out for and what something is actually worth.

 

Well those prices would be fair, if you retained exclusive use of them. But you don't. They're priced as if you are the only person using them and not being sold in bulk. For that much, you can just hire an artist.

 

Thanks for the feedback, everyone.

@ShadowK, I actually have downloaded Daz3D previously. But having to pick up one more software just to build a game on another software seems a real drag to me.

Well... back to the drawing board.

Thanks again, everyone. Good luck with your individual projects!

 

1. Should I hire someone to do all parts of this (i.e. create, rig and animate) or should I hire 3 separate persons for each part (e.g. 1 for creating, 1 for rigging,1 for animating)?

In my experience, "generalists" are often people who don't know too much about anything. I suggest hiring a modeler and an animator, and the animator should be able to rig it.

2. What are the pros and cons of these 2 options?

If people don't know how to animate well, you'll end up with great models that move around like weird puppets. Or, you'll have crazy good animations but models that look amateurish. Or, most likely, both.

3. Any other thoughts on how else this can be done? I'm not keen on DIY though.

UNITY ASSET STORE. This is a shameless plug: http://www.InfinityPBR.com -- See, I made a game (TheBarbarianGame.com) and couldn't have done it without the asset store. It's an RPG too.

Now I'm in the process of updating the characters so I have more control over them and so they're higher quality -- the stuff I got from the store was great, but I want more control and modern quality.

So I did what you're talking about: Found an animator and a modeler who are both amazing. many thousands of dollars later, I have something to show for it. And I'm selling them on the asset store. Because really -- without it, I'd not have bene able to make my game. So for others, it only makes sense to help out and help fund more characters.

(That being said, check out my stuff at the Infinity PBR link or in my signature below -- you'll probably find that it's higher quality than most stuff in the store, and the "procedural" aspect of the texturing will help make sure that your characters actually match your game. If you have any special requests for stuff you need, let me know!)

 

@sfbaystudios, I found that very interesting, as I am in the process of creating a design spec for a modeller/animator and I was hoping to get a generalist who could understand the whole creative process I wanted to achieve. The idea that a generalist might not do my commission justice is making me reconsider.

 

I could absolutely be wrong about it. It could just be a crazy bias. However, when I've seen the work of a "generalist", it's generally (<-- get it?) not that good. And when I see killer modeling work, and ask if they do animating, they usually say something like "I can, but i'm not that good at it" or "no". Same with animators -- they're ether not very good at modeling, or they don't do it at all.

 

Contact me to get a quote. Can do models from early concepts to integration into unity.
there are generalist who do a good job at everything out there, and I think I'm far from being the only one.

 

While this is true, you can rig it and than apply mecanim animations to it to validate it is mecanim ready AND you can check to see if you have any bad clipping occurring as the model moves. You can always use Ethan's animations from the stealth project assuming you can rig your model to human.

 

Not true in general but not wrong either.

Some could do both but one not as good as the other and don't want to argue or raise false hopes in the customer. And gerneralists not being as good ... that depends on your expectations of "not that good".

I know people of every kind: Those who mainly animate, those who mainly model, those who can do both very well (but most of them don't freelance). And then there's everything inbetween I am sure.

People who are exceptionally well at one thing are as good for a reason. They do mostly this. And they also know what they can't do as good so they son't sell it at all. Obviously as your wording implies you are someone who would definitely expect stellar results on both fields. So not to disappoint or lose time on something someone else specialzed can do much better much quicker they don't sell it at all.
It all boils down to expectations and finding the right person. Personally I'd say - yes you are biased and it's not true for everybody. I'd expect you are extrapolation from a few experiences but I can see where you are coming from.

 

As a contract animator I prefer not to have to animate other peoples attempts at rigging, Unless they are basic humanoid low poly characters.
I like having the models created for me, and the quality of freelance modelers over the years has really increased.
Rigging on the other hand seems to be the point where people fall apart. Some modelers can rig, and believe it or not a lot of animators can't rig.
I've performed several small fix it jobs on animation rigs over the last year.
Personally I wouldn't consider hiring an animator who couldn't rig characters. I also wouldn't hire modelers who couldn't create UVs and texture. These are requirements being contract artists I think.
If you consider to hire only 1 generalist artist to do the work from modeling to animations, I think I would hire two generalists.
I also agree with sfbay - you will get the highest quality from specialists. But make sure animators can rig and modelers can texture.