Hi BAs,
we’re looking for paid assistance by an experienced 3D character artist/rigger/animator (person or group). Preferably handled as one job (but a task splitting could be an option). We’re a small media company based in the Black Forest, Germany, mainly doing fancy web productions. This time we need to include 3D characters (which is beyond our pro skills).
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WHAT WE ARE TARGETTING FOR:
We want to animate 2 characters (face and body animations) inside a web-browser-based application. Have a look at an example page of THREEjs (the WebGL 3D engine we use) here:
https://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_animation_skinning_additive_blending
Besides the missing face animations and a good looking model this is very close to what we are targetting for „from a technical point of view“: Here, animation blending is demonstrated as well as mixing poses (sneak, sad aso.) triggered by a program logic (in this case interactive buttons), a little bit like for game characters.
WHEN TO START and FINISH:
- Preferably yesterday / Characters within a week would be perfect - the sooner the better, since here we have to check back with our client - then maybe a revision (if needed) a week later / Animations until mid of December with at least 2 idle and 2 gesturing animations much sooner to start our own work / If you think this needs more time, just tell us; it doesn’t instantly mean that you fall through the grid
WHAT WE NEED:
Modeling and rigging:
- 2 character models (f/m) based on given turntable photos of real persons), fully-rigged with a Mixamo skeleton (!?) (including fingers) and for face animations (based on ShapeKeys and including teeth and a tongue for the mouth when opened)
- The characters should have a Disney/Pixar like style, i. e. between cartoon-like and photo-realistic / Final poly-count probably between 25-30k, but don’t start low-poly or with MetaHuman, we hate both extremes
- The characters shall get some (static) poses (that will be used to blend in and modify the basic body animations (see below) for e. g. turning the head, raising the hand)
- As proof of final work and quality, the character needs to include an idle body loop animation (from Mixamo for example) and an arbitrary animation for the face showing the character talking (can also be found in the web or provided by us)
- The final result should be the Blender sources, no props, no shiny video rendering, no export file
- At this point the job could be splitted between model artist and animator
Animating the characters:
- The characters will be animated (like game characters) program-controlled by triggering sequences of prepared body and face animations that are blended / Tell us if the body skeleton used by Mixamo is for some reason a problem such that we can adapt the job of the model artist
- We have recorded face animations (ShapeKeys) with “FaceCap” for the characters talking, which are of high quality and only need a little bit of tweaking and minor repairs / Easy no-brainer job, several minutes of material
- The face animations are handled as separate tracks so all body animations are completely independent of the face animations from your point of view
- We need believable human-like but rather simple chunks of loopable „presentation“ animations: Think about a teacher that holds a lecture, doing movements that a normal guy would do in this situation and then it gets divided into loopable parts to repeat them when needed in an arbitrary sequence
- Always in standing position (no walk, no jump, no fancy stuff, mainly idle animations for the lower body part and „actions as described“ for the upper body part (like crossing the arms, pointing on an imaginary whiteboard, idle poses while looking) / So there’s no storyboard and we don’t need very sophisticated movements (but of course we already know what animations we need in detail)
- We are open for your proposal what works best to create the full body animations (motion capture with equipment, motion capture based on video analysis, hand-crafted, whatever looks good and is time-efficient)
- The different „actions“ later get triggered by picking the right area of the animation track to blend in (like pointing at the white board) and then fade out to idle again (as demonstrated by the mentioned THREEjs example or done in a video game)
- Since the needed kind of body animations are very basic, maybe an experienced artist doing hand-crafted animation assisted by his/her tools can offer the best and quickest approach in this case / We would prefer that
- Every „gesture“ (like pointing aso.) should probably be either 5 or 10 seconds long and loopable / All in all we assume that 30 seconds of idle animations (just standing) and 150 seconds of gesturing animations in total should be more than sufficient for our needs (but depends on technical options to blend in the static poses for more variety)
WHAT QUALIFIES YOU FOR THE JOB(S):
- Rock-solid Blender character modeling and/or animation experience to handle the described job without the need to even think about how to do it
- If you’re doing it just for the money without passion and enthusiasm, we are not compatible
- We exect you to be communicative and offer revisions if needed to get a satisfying result
- Video meetings must be no problem for you: You need to offer good communication skills to talk in fluent English (or German) and the appropriate bandwidth to do so
THANKS FOR YOUR INTEREST SO FAR:
Please contact us directly for inquires / Provide at a minimum the following information to start with:
- Give links to demo reels and relevant/similar work experience
- Give a ballpark number of what you seem fitting for the experience and quality of work you will provide
- Describe the approach you would take/offer for the body animation creation process and why this is the best approach with respect to time and money needed / Keep it short
- Don’t skip a point please or you may fall through the grid even though you might be a perfect match, cause we’ve unfortunately no time to hunt for clues in the web ourselves if you won’t provide enough to convince us
Looking forward to hearing from you!