Firstly this post is not personally directed toward any member of this board. It just seems to me that the question of "Why is no one doing my request?
" has come up more often in the past few months, and very few good answers have been given other than "It takes time".
So I'm making this post to shed some light on what really goes into a request of varying complexity.
Skins
A skin is probably the simplest request in terms of overall work. If you are expecting industry standard quality, like what ships with UT2kx then you are looking at 6-12+ hours of actual work depending on the detail involved and how much of a perfectionist the skin author is.
Models
Models are the next step of complexity. Its not just popping out some polygons. I realize that many a requester doesn't care about things like mesh flow, polycount, good uv layout etc, they just want their favorite character to be playable in their favorite game. To give an example, Daz, the (a?) lead character artist for EA north said it took him a working day to model and texture a head for the james bond games. That's between 8 and 14 hours for just a head, from someone who does this every working day and is paid well for it. So its safe to assume between 24 and 32 working hours for a complete model with skin, and another 2-6 hours on top of that for rigging it to an existing skeleton.
Custom rigged or animated models
Another level of complexity is not being able to use the default ut skeletons on a model. That requires the time of the previous step, plus about a working week or 2 of animations. A single character for UT2k4 requires 87 separate sequences to have a complete animation set. (72 actually since the 5 jump directions are 3 parts each) Some are short yes, but since most are cyclical a single mistake or un smooth movement will be noticed, because you will see the sequence a few hundred times in any 20 minute gaming session. By way of example I was given a space of six hours to do two animations on an unreal like skeleton for an animator test for a company I applied to a while back. Those were considered preliminary anims, which would still need some later tweaking. So you figure 3-4 hours per animation cycle, 72 sequences, you are looking at 9-12 straight days (ie no sleep or breaks) of time for a fully animated character.
Custom vehicles and monsters
The top level of complexity. These things require every other step, plus scripting knowledge. They have to be PROGRAMED to work properly, which means that they involved bug testing. I can't give a direct time estimate on the coding portions because they varry widely depending on just what the capabilitys are of the object in question. However, a basic vehicle likely takes about 4-6 hours to code and balance properly.
Now don't let any of that discourage any of you from requesting things, just go into it knowing what you are asking for and the fair market value of what you get. Every step listed requires a separate skill, not all of which everyone has. Someone just getting into the industry can expect a salary in the neighborhood of $45000 a year. So the market value of a full skin of good quality is just over $200. A model, skinned and rigged about $900. a custom animated model would go for $1800-2700 and a custom scripted object somewhere above that.
Just some things to take into account when someone doesn't jump at your request.
Edit: Corrected some things I forgot the first time.
" has come up more often in the past few months, and very few good answers have been given other than "It takes time". So I'm making this post to shed some light on what really goes into a request of varying complexity.
Skins
A skin is probably the simplest request in terms of overall work. If you are expecting industry standard quality, like what ships with UT2kx then you are looking at 6-12+ hours of actual work depending on the detail involved and how much of a perfectionist the skin author is.
Models
Models are the next step of complexity. Its not just popping out some polygons. I realize that many a requester doesn't care about things like mesh flow, polycount, good uv layout etc, they just want their favorite character to be playable in their favorite game. To give an example, Daz, the (a?) lead character artist for EA north said it took him a working day to model and texture a head for the james bond games. That's between 8 and 14 hours for just a head, from someone who does this every working day and is paid well for it. So its safe to assume between 24 and 32 working hours for a complete model with skin, and another 2-6 hours on top of that for rigging it to an existing skeleton.
Custom rigged or animated models
Another level of complexity is not being able to use the default ut skeletons on a model. That requires the time of the previous step, plus about a working week or 2 of animations. A single character for UT2k4 requires 87 separate sequences to have a complete animation set. (72 actually since the 5 jump directions are 3 parts each) Some are short yes, but since most are cyclical a single mistake or un smooth movement will be noticed, because you will see the sequence a few hundred times in any 20 minute gaming session. By way of example I was given a space of six hours to do two animations on an unreal like skeleton for an animator test for a company I applied to a while back. Those were considered preliminary anims, which would still need some later tweaking. So you figure 3-4 hours per animation cycle, 72 sequences, you are looking at 9-12 straight days (ie no sleep or breaks) of time for a fully animated character.
Custom vehicles and monsters
The top level of complexity. These things require every other step, plus scripting knowledge. They have to be PROGRAMED to work properly, which means that they involved bug testing. I can't give a direct time estimate on the coding portions because they varry widely depending on just what the capabilitys are of the object in question. However, a basic vehicle likely takes about 4-6 hours to code and balance properly.
Now don't let any of that discourage any of you from requesting things, just go into it knowing what you are asking for and the fair market value of what you get. Every step listed requires a separate skill, not all of which everyone has. Someone just getting into the industry can expect a salary in the neighborhood of $45000 a year. So the market value of a full skin of good quality is just over $200. A model, skinned and rigged about $900. a custom animated model would go for $1800-2700 and a custom scripted object somewhere above that.
Just some things to take into account when someone doesn't jump at your request.
Edit: Corrected some things I forgot the first time.
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