I want to gather together all the bad stories about complete outsourcing of game characters (starting from sketch) for your projects. We at 3D Ace Studio have some experience in creating game characters and would be very glad for any information on such problems. Any misunderstandings with outsourcing partners? Stylistic mismatches? Anything else?

I have no experience with this personally, but you may find Jon Jones' blog interesting.

Not a problem unique to outsourcing, but it's fairly common for a 3D artist to be completely incapable of producing a model that looks like a concept art (mainly for curvy biological models). A model can also be made in a way nearly impossible to rig and animate, or to make skins for. In personal experience I had the making of some 3D character clothes outsourced to me, but I didn't have access to the engine and model so I couldn't personally 'try them on' the character, and ran into major color issues because the in-game lighting wasn't white, it was heavily blue and made all the clothing textures look flat and dark and nothing like they looked in my art program. I've also had clothing design outsourced to me, but been crippled by being required only to design clothes that could be painted directly on the model, no shoulder pads or other 3D elements.

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Original post by sunandshadow Not a problem unique to outsourcing, but it's fairly common for a 3D artist to be completely incapable of producing a model that looks like a concept art (mainly for curvy biological models). A model can also be made in a way nearly impossible to rig and animate, or to make skins for. In personal experience I had the making of some 3D character clothes outsourced to me, but I didn't have access to the engine and model so I couldn't personally 'try them on' the character, and ran into major color issues because the in-game lighting wasn't white, it was heavily blue and made all the clothing textures look flat and dark and nothing like they looked in my art program. I've also had clothing design outsourced to me, but been crippled by being required only to design clothes that could be painted directly on the model, no shoulder pads or other 3D elements.

Thanks for the good answer!

The problem with fitting into engine has two sides, and both of them are typical for our company, because we have our own self-developed 3D engine

Lots of reasons...