Advertising for help - Commercial & Non-commercial. Read this first!

Welcome, and good luck with your project, or good luck finding the artist you need to find.

Below are my tips for advertising for help, so that you can get who you need for the job, and so that the artists can feel safe in the knowledge that they are contributing to something amazing with direction.

You are “pitching” or trying to “sell” your idea to others. Realise that just like a job interview, CV, Advertisement or anything else you need to get someone’s attention, trust and respect, while bringing them into the vision.

TIPS

  • Have an existing post count so people know you are a “real” member. This is of course not always possible, but is the easiest way to gain trust.
  • Show a substantial amount of high quality previous work when requesting others to help on a project, or show that commercial offerings are legitimate. People will follow those who are heading somewhere exciting.
  • Link to a pre-made structured website, or project page that proves its real, and existing effort is being spent on your behalf.
  • Write your request with as much background information as possible.
  • Structure your request visually well, breaking it up into sections, and titling each.
  • Don’t ask for someone to email you for confirmation or to join your team… people need to know you are committed to coming back and checking your posts. Otherwise you could be posting at every 3d art forum on the net and expecting people to roll in from everywhere.

NOTE

  • Email addresses may be removed from threads by first time posters depending on the quality of information or circumstances
  • Threads may be locked or deleted if the request is poor. It is your responsibility to re-post your request with sufficient information.

Good luck with a successful proposal. There are people out their who are keen to help/work, and we welcome your posting your jobs/projects.

Alltaken

I don’t think we need rules about this. Morons asking us to do their work for them can be easily identified and ignored. Rules like these would simply make things more difficult for people with legitimate requests.

Its easy to tell the stupid from the serious. these guidelines are only there to help serious people not look stupid. they are not black/white. At the end of the day the “Mods” get to choose whatever they want.

Alltaken

Alltaken…

Now there’s a familiar face, and someone I remember from years ago.
I do not know if you would remember me… it’s okay, it was a long long
time ago, when this site was called Elysiun.

(the project was to fill a Santa’s sleigh with toys.)

(http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=17593)

Since then I dropped offline (a long story) but eventually having wended my way back and landed on this thread I think I might be able to add something relevant to the thread of “asking for help”, aka Proposals.

I understand that what you listed are more along the lines of words to the wise than pronouncements, and I trust that my suggestions will be viewed in a similar light.

1. Be modest.

This doesn’t mean be needy, but if you are asking for help implies that you recognize that others have something you lack. There is a lot of talent here and it doesn’t hurt to recognize it as such. This doesn’t mean sucking up either (easy to spot) … more a matter of having the good grace to be comfortable that recognizing someone else’s talent is not a weakness, but a strength: the ability to recognize ability.

Contrapositively, if you invite people to your party, you should be ready to cater to them. If you ask for help, you should also be eager to render (no pun intended) help. Noob or guru, it helps to remember that we are travelling similar paths to similar destinations… animation/modeling is a frontiere after all… we are all pioneers here: as such, a sense of self-reliance and a willingness to lend a hand are really two sides of the same coin.

I could have called this rule “Have respect”.

2. Dream big.

If a project is small enough to do it yourself, you probably should, asking for just enough help to learn the things you need to know. But if it is big enough to genuinely require a team of others, you need to be able to dream, in detail, in technicolour, with focus, about the nature of your vision; to never tire of explaining it, embroidering it… enlarging it. In proposing a project, what you are really doing is trying to share your inspiration.

While it may be hard to fake respect, it is probably impossible to fake inspiration. Which means that the complementary lemma to “Dream big” is “Know yourself”.

3. Be patient.

Having spoken from experience, the diligent reader might be inclined to wonder whether I am speaking from the standpoint of learning from ones mistakes or sharing ones successes – and to this I will address my closing point.

Short answer: both.

You don’t necessarily know when you are succeeding…
With the Blender Elves project I felt at the time that I had failed to interest enough people to complete what I had started.

From where I sit now, I realize that so many of the meta-hopes I had held for that project are now actually goals which others have indpendently internalized… advancing the flag far further than I could have alone.

I see evidence of this spirit in new Blender model repositories, better tutorials, stereo renderings techniques… not to mention commercial projects.

After time, I count as success what I once saw as failure.

Does this mean if feel “I caused” my goals to become real? Of course not. What it means is that the real goals that one must tap into are transpersonal, as are the modes of the realization of those goals.

“Be patient” really means “Keep trying”.


So, as is my wont, I have wandered verbosely far afield, while remaining (I hope) focused on the topic of Proposals. I confess I am more of a writer who dabbles in animation, than an animator who occasionally writes postings to this forum.

No matter.

I came here looking for the threads of where I had stood, looking to understand where I had been: seeking to learn exactly what the title of this thread suggested it held: hints on asking for help with a project.

Your six very practical points are much more succinct and probably a lot more helpful than my three rather abstract psychological ones… but the act of explaining what I have learned helps me learn it… and maybe also some other person.

Yes, I did come here with another proposal, but I think I will take a little time to reflect on these “rules” first, whilst I catch up on some of the other postings and progress on the Blender front in general.

In the meantime, it’s good to be back and to find that even if I had forgotten my password here, this forum (by any other name) had not deleted my account. Cheers…

Ys,

Shouldn’t this be in the News and Discussion. in the off topic theres almost never any proposal.

People tend to post in random places, so I have it in both forums just in case :wink:

Alltaken

Hello Users of Blenderartists.org,

My name is Jake Bown and I am currently building a Windows based transformation pack which allows people to convert thier old PC’s into a fully function Games console. The main purpose of having a console is to play games (obviously) and I am in need of some games for the new games console. If anyone could help, I will submit your name to the console and add your logo/name to the website. Thankyou,

Jake Bown.
CEO Minex Labs

Hi Jake,

If you read the first post on this thread, you’ll see it’s a list of good practices on how to ask for help without coming across rude to this community. There’s good advice there, that I suggest you compare with your post on this very same thread…

Please excuse my ignorance, but how come there’s not a dedicated Help forum or whatever? I want to post a thread asking for help in my project, but I haven’t a clue where on this website to post a thread, except in the off-topic forum. Help?

Hello? Anybody going to reply?

i can’t understand that what you people want to teach us… its looks funny////////

can someone help me when I run blender I still see my desktop and I don’t know how to get rid of this glitch I have got rid of it before but now I can’t remember im running ubuntu linux 9.04

  1. wrong place for asking this. :wink:

  2. have you tried turning off desktop compositing(in other words turn off desktop effects)?

I can’t have desktop effects my graphics card won’t handle it it might be another problem and I fixed it last time but can’t remember it damn

I agree with above views

thumps up for your article, great post…

This is an example of exactly how NOT TO request for help with a project:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=187695

hey, any of the above posters online??
Im new in these parts, and I’d like to talk to someone who knows what they’re doing
and their way around.:confused:

you are trying to post for some help with a project? feel free to PM me with what you are doing and I can help out.

I’ve just started using blender in the last couple of months, and I’m interested in getting some feedback on a model that I’ve come up with. I think its ok for a first time but could be heaps better.