So I have a 3D engine capable of character animation, and a plug-in for exporting models/bones/animations from 3dsMax 8.0 using Biped and Physique. This seems to work relatively well. How would I go about commissioning the creation of a large number of animations for a particular character rig? I have a descent amount of money to spend (or at least I think its decent), but I have no in-house artist or deep expertise in 3dsMax. Are there companies that do this type of work?

Yes there are a few around like Turbosquid, just google "3D models" to get more results. You could also try canvasing artist forum's like Polycount or CGTalk (see my signature) for an artist to hire.

You may also want to try reading Contracting Art For Your Game.

Finding someone to animate your models is possible, but I don't think that it will be cheap ;-) . For a complete large set of animations you will need to pay a few thousand $ if made by an professional artist.

Do you want to animate a humanoid ? How about using motion capturing ? A lot of freely available libraries provides lot of motion capture files. I.e. take a look at http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/ it contains about 2000 (not 100% sure) motion captures.

To save more money I would sugguest to learn some animation skills, in combination with motion captures you will be able to create some decent animated humanoids.


If money doesn't matter just forget about what I've said =)

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Ashaman