Meez was an avatar and virtual room site that a lot of people spent their teens on. It closed with everything still sitting on it. No export, no archive, no notice.
I have been pulling it back out of what survived. The proprietary 3D format is decoded. 105 avatar meshes are out of it and rigged, 359 items are rebuilt from the original files, 208 backgrounds are recovered, and seven of the original animation filmstrips play again on the rig. The site is up, and the MeezMaker dresses a live avatar. None of that is a mockup or a plan.
What is missing is the rest of the shop. 33 hairs exist against the hundreds Meez shipped, and the rooms people actually built are the least recovered part of the whole archive. That is where you would come in.
Unpaid, and I would rather lead with it than bury it
Nobody on this is paid, me included, and I am not going to sell it to you as exposure. Here is what I can actually promise. Your name stays on what you made, credited publicly and permanently. If this turns into something that can pay people, the people who built it go first. And you would be making things for a crowd that has been asking where this went for over ten years.
One more thing worth saying to this audience in particular: none of the art on this project is AI generated, and none of it will be. Every asset either came out of the archive or was made by a person. That is the standard I am asking you to work to, and it is the standard I hold myself to.
The five jobs
3D modelling. Garments, hair, shoes, bags and accessories, fitted to two fixed bodies. You get handed a specific piece plus whatever the archive caught of it: the original shop image, the mesh where one survived, and its neighbours in the same family. An idea of your own is welcome too, if it feels like Meez.
Animation. The old client held 150 animation definitions across 46 filmstrips and 5,048 frame steps. Idle, four walks, dance, VIP dance, headbang, squat, five sits, kiss, laugh, backflip, mosh. Seven filmstrips are recovered and playable, so you key against a capture of the original running beside you. You match its timing and its attitude; how you get there is yours.
Backgrounds and environments. 600×800 portrait plates, painted, saturated, a little cartoon. This is the thinnest part of the archive, which makes it the role with the most of your own work in it. Usually all that survives is a small thumbnail, so you are painting the thing back rather than tracing it.
Textures and 2D art. A Meez item carries its detail in the map rather than the mesh. That is how a 382 triangle top still reads as a plaid shirt. Also catalogue thumbnails, item icons and interface pieces.
Forum moderation. Not a portfolio job, and the one with the most trust in it. The boards are built, in private testing, and open to the public soon.
The constraints, because you will want these before you decide
Blender 5.2.0 LTS. No Auto-Rig Pro and no Rigify: the Meez skeleton is fixed and the bone names are load bearing.
MeezRig_F is 57 bones, MeezRig_M is 55. Symmetric A-pose, arms out and down. You model in Rest position.
The poly budget is genuinely low, and these numbers are measured off the 359 items already rebuilt rather than guessed. Median item: 304 triangles. The whole library runs 22 to 1,645. Tops sit around 382, bottoms 280, shoes 368, hair 393, and the heaviest hair in the shop is 1,645. One material and one texture image per item, every time. If your piece is in the thousands it is not a Meez item yet, however good it looks.
Weights get copied off the body with a Data Transfer modifier on Nearest Face Interpolated. Never Automatic Weights, which computes its own from bone envelopes and lets the seams drift the moment the idle plays. Then prune every group left carrying nothing. A real Meez tee has 11 vertex groups. Not 40.
Export runs through a script instead of File > Export. 20 of the 57 bones carry a mirrored bind frame that Blender cannot store, and a garment exported Blender’s way binds the left arm and leg about 1.22 units out, which reads on the site as a torn sleeve. The script rewrites those matrices: 0.0008 units against the authentic original.
You get a kit. Both body files with the body, head and rig already in true bind pose, a worked example garment, and the import, export and verification scripts. verify_garment.py answers one question before you send anything: does your piece render on the site the way Blender shows it.
What the work actually looks like
Plenty of pieces come out of the archive as geometry and nothing else. The shape survived; the surface did not. Getting from that to a fitted, textured, finished item is the job.
A good first contribution is one garment, or one dance, finished. That is a real thing on its own, and there is no expectation past it.
If you want in
https://classicmeez.com/apply has the full brief, the reference sheets, captures of the current build running, the per-role specs, and the form. It asks for a portfolio and roughly how much time you can give. Tick more than one role if more than one fits.
Ask me anything in the thread and I will answer it.