I’d recommend getting more experienced with Blender before trying to take on any serious animation projects (ie longer than a gif). For one, there’s a good chance what you think isn’t a complex animation is (you said “sets” plural, so its probably a complex project). And sculpting/modeling characters is inherently complex. If you haven’t modeled a character before, let me warn you now “some help” won’t be enough. Takes at least a year* to get any good at modeling characters - and you’ll need rigging, clothing, hair, textures. Sculpted characters need to be retopologized too, unless sculpting on a mid-poly basemesh that already has correct topology.
These are things you simply can’t know until you have experience animating and modeling characters. 3D projects are always more complicated than people who aren’t experienced expect, and if nothing else, prior experience on shorter projects will set you up to be able to plan and scale a project that is feasible to complete much more effectively.
In fact, unless you expect character modeling and rigging to be your passion, and/or aren’t aiming for a specific stylistic look, I’d actually suggest looking into something like Human Generator (you’ll need the commercial licensing, this may seem expensive but is actually a VERY good price AND Blender Native), CharMorph (free Blender addon, includes MB-Lab models and Reom, noticeably lower quality than Human Gen), Reallusion Character Creator (it’ll cost you more than Human Generator in the long run, but allows for a greater variety of ages and body types, and their plugin imports the models pretty well). Daz Studio probably costs less than CC, but they can’t be bothered to keep their own Blender plugin up to date so it doesn’t work.
Trying to find a skilled character modeller who will work for free* on someone else’s passion project will be harder than saving up for one of the good character tools. And the characters will be rigged. They’re a great way to begin character animation and art when you lack the skillset or even just the time to make good looking characters yourself. You’d still need to learn to animate or find an animator, but you can learn that from youtube tutorials. Characters can be modeled with polys. If you have zero experience sculpting characters, it won’t look better sculpted than poly modeled anyway.
* Everyone claiming to have mastered full character creation from character modeling, texturing, and rigging in less than a year has turned out to be using Daz or Character Creator in my experience.
** 20% revenue off a youtube short isn’t going to be much of anything - it’s essentially working for free, particularly if you’re new to animation and don’t already have an audience. And if you need someone else to do the character models and animation for the animation, they’re doing probably more than 20% of the work.
This implies you also want them to help make the sets, plural, in addition to most of the animation and helping with the character models. Make sure the percentage you’re offering is fair for the percentage of work you’re hoping they contribute. You’re likely underestimating the complexity and thus feasibility of your project. A simple short can be a semester long group project in an academic setting. This is true even for live action films, where no modeling and animating is needed.
