Questions about commissioning 3d models and art outsourcing

[Anonymous]

There’s a personal project I’ve been working on that requires a lot of art assets, mainly 3d models of real buildings around Dublin city centre (I am fully aware of Virtual Dublin so you don’t need to bring that up). I’m not looking for uber high detail, but enough so that they are accurate and you can still make fairly large scenes out of them (approximately City 17 level of detail).

I’ve been wondering about the best way to acquire them. Obviously I’d be willing to pay for commissions, but I’d like to know what sort of rates to expect. How much for a model of the central bank? The Bank of Ireland on College Green? Or for a row of shops on Grafton St? Will the price be less if I supply all the reference photographs? I wouldn’t mind also knowing how long it would take for each model to be made.

I’d also like to know who to commission. Should I go local (I know you may be biased in answering this, but please…) with artist who live in Ireland and can possibly scout the locations themselves? Or should I go to an artist outsourcing website or modding forum and ask for offers? Is there any advice you could give me if I do decide to go there?

Also, I’m concerned about what sort of license or ownership I would get over the assets. Ideally I’d want to be able to use it in whatever I want for any purpose while the artist gets full credit for his or her creation.

It would be very helpful for me to know this information, especially in deciding on which step I take next. So if you have any advice or thoughts, please post them and I’d be very grateful.

Thanks in advance.

[Anonymous]

Hey Sofox, its unlikely that someone will price the job per building, asking how much is a model of the central bank is the same as asking what the dimensions are of a mid size Chinese restaurant, or the proverbial length of the piece of string. Typically the going rate for freelancers is usually about 30 – 50 euro per hour, although a student may be prepared to accept less than that or indeed accept a lump sum for the entire project.

The cost will also depend largely on your requirements eg. buildings must be 20k polys or less, have tiling diffuse, spec and normal maps, environment maps on windows, have 3 levels of LOD plus no matter how good your reference pics are it may be necessary for your guy to go and take more, but that depends on if you are willing to compromise on accuracy.

You also want to ensure upfront that you have some room to ask for changes and rework, so do ask about extra costs there as real-time model work can be tricky if it requires export and formatting and what not.
There are a lot of 3d guys out of work at the moment so you might get a good deal somewhere.

In short, be as explicit as you can in terms of what you expect at the start and it will serve you well throughout the project.

Good luck.

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