Commissioning Modders

[chalk6 10]

Allow me to preface this with I'm not directly looking for someone to commission to do mod work here, I am however looking for a place or the right thread to find people to commission to do mod work.
If there is not already a place for this are we able to create one here? I think it would be beneficial to utilize and better appreciate modders looking for work while maybe putting a little extra change in their pocket. I've posted in many places trying to get a mod I desperately want created however I feel as though I'm not reaching and targeting modders in order to get what I want.
I'm doing and wording this the way I am in observation of the rules.

Any and all prevalent information is welcome.

-Chalk 

[da12thMonkey 1943]

I'm sure if most modders wanted to get paid direct comission for creating models to other peoples' specifications, they'd be sensible enough to charge the industry standard rates for comissioned 3D work - which often runs in the region of several thousand dollars.

i.e. it's probably unrealistic for you to believe you can afford to pay somebody to make a mod for you unless it's something they already want to make themselves and they'll do it for cheap because they were making it anyway, or they're too stupid to know how much money they could make doing comissioned work for people elsewhere online.

Bear in mind that you're also in competition with BIS on this since they are currently offering to pay community members for outsourced 3D work on the Tanoa expansion, and can probably afford to pay people here more than you can:

https://www.bistudio.com/company/careers/3d-artist-for-arma3-structures

[warlord554 2065]

^^ as usual monkey said it perfectly!

[war_lord 934]

Basically, you can't pay people for any work that involves the BIS tools, so the only thing you can actually commission are models and textures, which is going to be prohibitively expensive, because the asking price for those is targeted at professional usage. You're far better off learning to do what you need done yourself.

[chalk6 10]

I'm sure if most modders wanted to get paid direct comission for creating models to other peoples' specifications, they'd be sensible enough to charge the industry standard rates for comissioned 3D work - which often runs in the region of several thousand dollars.

i.e. it's probably unrealistic for you to believe you can afford to pay somebody to make a mod for you unless it's something they already want to make themselves and they'll do it for cheap because they were making it anyway, or they're too stupid to know how much money they could make doing comissioned work for people elsewhere online.

Bear in mind that you're also in competition with BIS on this since they are currently offering to pay community members for outsourced 3D work on the Tanoa expansion, and can probably afford to pay people here more than you can:

https://www.bistudio.com/company/careers/3d-artist-for-arma3-structures

I'm not trying to insult your intelligence or disagree with you, but for further clarification; if I just wanted one single weapon made it would still run me that much!? 

[da12thMonkey 1943]

Depends how well you want it made and how long it'll take the person to do.

 

http://www.katsbits.com/articles/how-much-should-i-charge-for-freelance-3d-modeling-work.php

 

You see there that the industry rate for people working in the US is running around a minimum of $20 per hour, and the people who are better and more experienced will charge you more. People from countries where the average cost of living is lower, may be able to charge less - and it is quite common for larger game devs to outsource 3D work to teams in offices in other countries to minimise production costs.

 

I'd say on average, a well made original weapon model with good quality textures, all materials is at least 10 hours of work. So you'd be looking at spending $200 as a miniumum just for the model alone, and more to get it animated and configged for Arma with all the LODs and things it need - assuming your 3D artist is actually capable of making animations in the first place, and actually knows how to set it up for ingame use.

 

Really though, it's a price you negociate with the artist rather than being a set number - since they need to know what your criteria are, and they then have a fair idea of how long it'd take them to do what you want and how much they want for performing the task. But even if the model is very simple it'll still take multiple hours to make a working addon and will never be something you can pay for with pocket change.

 

You can probably find weapon models cheaper than that on places like Turbosquid, but that's because they're not direct comissions - they're items that an artist has made already as personal projects and will sell to multiple customers to in order to recoup the the hours spent working on it. Generally they're far from game-ready too.

[PuFu 4591]

I'm not trying to insult your intelligence or disagree with you, but for further clarification; if I just wanted one single weapon made it would still run me that much!? 

There is no argue here. If anyone is willing to do it you for "a little extra change in their pocket" that's all lovely (if you do find such a guy let me know), but someone with professional commercial viable tools that goes around 2000$ a year to license will most likely charge a real commercial price.

 

the 10h Monkey used as reference is not nearly close for a BI's quality product. I would say it would take about 20-30h to get the job done (and that means HP , LP and bakes) + textures and materials and the basic LODs and configs. I excluded the character (reload) animations on purpose, since that is a thing on it's own. In short, if i were to do it for you, the fee would be around 1000EUs for the the entire thing, using the generic BIS reload animations. That is the real price of a bespoke 3d game ready weapon model 

 

You can always choose to buy such a model from TurboSquid, but then again those models are never "game ready", or from my own experience the percentage is under 1%. Even the ones labed "game ready" are actually lower polygon meshes, but they always lack the game readiness.

 

I think most of you don't really understand the amount of work that is placed into all the mods and the custom content since you receive it for free...To put it in perspective, the content of a mod like RHS for instance, goes over 200k in terms of man hours (billable hours that is)

[war_lord 934]

Basically, you're looking at $200+ just for a model and texture that may or may not be game ready, and is certainly not Arma 3 quality. And even with art assets there's still other stuff that has to go into an Arma gun, sounds, animation, ballistics. Seriously, take the money, buy a good set of tools, and learn to make stuff yourself. Modding isn't a dark art.    

[chortles 263]

Or get Blender followed by Alwarren's Arma Toolbox and spend not a dime beyond whatever you might donate to Alwarren.

[da12thMonkey 1943]

the 10h Monkey used as reference is not nearly close for a BI's quality product. I would say it would take about 20-30h to get the job done (and that means HP , LP and bakes) + textures and materials and the basic LODs and configs.

 

Yup, I'll readilly admit I was lowballing the estimated work hours here. I wanted to point out that the costs soon stacks up, but without using big numbers that might seem hyperbolic to people here who are not aware exactly how long it can take to make something using the full, modern 3D pipeline.

 

There are shortcuts to take, that can yield acceptable results to the layman and would be the norm in previous gen games (and those are the sort of things one would discuss with the artist when negociating price). But yes; if we're talking about a really great addon that achieves the sort of visual quality that a number of people in this community are doing for free in their own time, for the love of what they do - 10 hrs is vastly under-estimating things.

 

Certainly for me anyway, because I'm pretty sure I'm the slowest 3D modeller in the world (and maybe that's why I don't even contemplate attempting to do this professionally) :D