Looking for an Artist/Animator for a 3D Game

Flemmard

Newbie
Feb 22, 2018
73
36
Hello guys,

After seeing a lot of good (and not so good) games here, but not finding THE one that I'd love, I wanted to make one.
I have a good background in C++, kinda new to UE but hugely willing to learn and share.

So here it is: As a developper, I suck at art. Even worse at 3D modeling.
So i'm looking for (if possible) someone would be able to handle that (shit like Maya or Blender or whatever he/she loves).

For now, the game is a prototype with things taken from the sims(Whickedwhims), WoW and so on ..

The type of game:
Inspired a lot by Total Seduction (I love this concept) in the game style.

I can't tell more about story or fetishes right now as it mainly depends on what could be animated :)

The only thing I know, is it should not be a "click and fuck", it should have story, grinding and such .. real like ;)

If someone is interested or wants to know more, feel free to respond to this thread, or MP :)

F.
 

uradamus

Active Member
Jan 4, 2018
680
752
I tend to doubt you'll have a lot of luck with this request. Very few people around here do their own 3D design work, and of those, most are already caught up in their own projects, myself included. It will be even harder because you are basically looking for someone who's already good at 3 entirely different jobs (concept art, modeling/texturing and rigging/animation) that are usually filled by different people on most serious teams. Plus for even mildly ambitious projects, even just 3 specialized artists would be a gross underestimate of the required labor.

Just speaking from experience, it takes on average 5-10 years to get to a point where someone can model high quality character models that are any good for being rigged, it's one of the most difficult modeling jobs to get good at. I've been developing as a 3D artist for 18+ years now and I still feel like I have so much to learn and a lot of areas where I can improve my workflow. Though I'm a fairly obsessive generalist who jumps back and forth between most aspects of digital art, programming, writing and many other interests. So I tend to progress a lot slower than others who are better at focusing on a single task. But it's fairly unheard of for new artists to reach a high level in game character modeling within say even 3 years or so.

You basically need a solid foundation in traditional art to grasp all the nuances of anatomy and creating attractive and realistic character designs. You also should be skilled at digital sculpting, as that is the best way to start roughing in and detailing a character model, or really any sort of organic modeling. Then the sculpted base models need to be retopologized to make them more suitable for rigging/animation, which requires a fair bit of knowledge concerning mesh deformations. Then that new model has to be UV unwrapped and have the details from the sculpted version baked to a normal map on it. This leads into the material/texture work, which these days usually involves a full PBR treatment. You'll need maps for the base colors, metalness, roughness, ambient occlusion, normals and possibly even a height map if your engine of choice supports parallax/displacement. Then you have to do all of this for each piece of clothing or environmental elements/props that are needed.

Then of course comes the rigging, weight painting and the creation of corrective shape keys as needed (if the engine supports them) to fix any weird deformation issues with the mesh when it comes to some of the more extreme pose positions. You'll probably also need to work out drivers to automatically use those shape keys in response to the skeletal posing. A proper rig will usually include a fair bit of secondary helper bones and even a little bit of scripting to handle useful things like ik/fk switching, etc. Then all of this has to be put to use to create the animations. And let me tell you - working out good looking animations involving 2 or more models in close contact is among the most difficult sort of animation work to pull off well. It gets even more convoluted if you decide you want the models to be customizable, as then you have to worry about correcting for alignment issues that can arise from trying to use animations made with one set of models of a certain size with other models that don't match the originals.

All of these steps for a primary character can take several months of full time work (in some cases even years), which is part of the reason why you'd usually split the task up over multiple artists who can each focus on smaller tasks in the overall process to condense that time frame. Low poly segmented stand-in models are usually provided to the rigger/animator(s) so they can start working on animations early on in the project before the actual models are even finished. In big studios they bring in artists in waves of increasing size as a project progresses. Starting with a small team of core coders and concept artists and the various department leads who do all the planning and prep work. Then they start bringing in freelance artists as needed to get the modeling and animation work done and let them go as soon as they are done with their part of the project. Big games, like say Skyrim or similar, will usually involve hundreds of artists during its development cycle.

I know this is a bit long winded, but I wanted you to be aware of the scope of what you are asking for here and realize that someone who can do all of this has probably put a decade or more into honing their craft. Such people are few and far between, even on sites that are geared towards game artists, and you probably won't find any who are interested in working for someone who isn't willing to pay them what their efforts are worth. Promises of future profit sharing won't fly with anyone serious about their work either, as most artists who've been around long enough have already been burnt on such deals at least once in their past and should have learned their lesson by now.

Anyone serious about basically starting a new studio and recruiting artists should make sure they have the appropriate capital, business acumen and professional project lead experience to see things through. If you want to just half ass things, it's best to set your sights much lower and spend a fair bit of your own time screwing up on your own and learning the ropes before trying to wrangle anyone else in with you.

Hopefully this will also help open the eyes of those who'd like to become game artists themselves. I don't want to dissuade anyone away from such goals, but it's good to have a big picture idea of what lies ahead if you are serious about this. In most cases you'll be better off to find one aspect of this process that you really love and embrace it as your specialty and find a place among bigger teams of professionals. For most creative tasks, you can get to an intermediate professional level within about 3 years of solid dedication to improving your skills. If you want to take the path of the one-man-army generalist just be aware that you've potentially got a multi-decade long slog ahead of you to reach your goals, especially if you are aiming for a high level of realism in your work. It will take a lot less if you are willing to settle for much simpler results, which is why low poly indie games have been such a big fad for so long now.
 

Flemmard

Newbie
Feb 22, 2018
73
36
Hi,

Thanks for your answer, I know said this way it's a lot to ask, but then, I dont expect Pixar-like thing.
And i dont expect/want 'High Fidelity models' or anything, but just be able to adapt existing models or things like that, things that I am not capable of (and not interested in, it's another set of competences and skills).

Again, I'm asking for someone willing to try to do simple things (I dont expect a model from scratch and such) that I am not capable of, or someone who is interested and wants to learn with me.

But yeah, it's maybe a lot to ask.

I'll probably start by myself with things from anywhere and try to mix that how i can :)

Maybe once at this point, people will be willing to help.

Again, thank for your nice answer. Not used to so much words here :)
 

uradamus

Active Member
Jan 4, 2018
680
752
Heh, once in a while I just feel moved to type. I try to avoid the wall of text posts when I can, but there is so much involved with game asset development that it's really hard to condense that much info into just a couple of well worded paragraphs. I've found in general a lot of folks underestimate just what tends to go into asset development, even more so when they hope to portray appealing 3D sex acts. So it's nice to lay it out once in a while to help people realize what's involved to help temper expectations and give a realistic look at what it takes.

If you just want to mess around with practice projects, it could be worth looking into models that were ripped/modded from pre-existing games. That is what most folks working on SFM animations work with. They tend to look pretty nice, have decent rigging (though not great), and are often already sort of game ready. I wouldn't at all advise using them for anything commercial though, you'd be opening yourself up to a world of legal hurt, but for just something to mess around with and learn from, they can be pretty handy. You can find a lot of such models via DeviantArt and sites like and . Valve released some tools for getting SFM stuff in/out of Blender, been a while since I messed with any of that, so you'd just have to search around a bit yourself if you're interested.
 

Flemmard

Newbie
Feb 22, 2018
73
36
Actually in my prototype, i first used models extracted from WoW. Those looked kinda nice, with animations and such.
Then, I extracted some animations from WhickedWhims (a The Sims 4 mod, with a LOOOOTS of sex animations).
But extracting sims is a pain. And merging the sims skeletons and merge them with WoW models .. plus add things like penis is ... way out of my skills. That's kinda what i'm looking, someone able to at least add little things to models and things like that :)

But yeah maybe at first i'll try to do with that ..

Thanks for the links i'll go get a look :)