How to contract artists?

[lazalong]

Hello,

Anyone has good specification documents that he could share with me?

I am working on an indie game project but I am a project manager & programmer not an artist.
Hence I have some difficulties to specify what I need to contract freelance artists (for 3D characters, animations, buildings, etc).

IMO it would be helpful to decrease misunderstanding between artists and project managers if someone could create a guidelines how to specify artistic deliverables and/or provide a good example of such documents.

Even better documents by category of deliverables if they exist (are contract for characters the same a for buildings or for landscape ?)

Some said to me: "be as specific as possible", "explain what you want".
Nice advices but not really helpful to create contract/specification documents as I don't know what is specific for an artist. For example:

• What are common polycounts?
• Should all characters be segmented in sub-meshes?
• When should I ask for normal maps? In all models? Only to decrease polycouts? In a second phase?
• What are the specs of normal maps?
• How do I define rigging needs?
• If several LOD (level-of-detail) of a model are needed should they be billed the same?
• Are HIGH or LOW polycouts models more expensive? (I would have though that creating good low polys is harder than high one).
• How do you define when a job is done correctly? (aka the job is so bad that no payments should be done).
• etc.

Also it could be useful to have some time expectations (or even price):

• Such a model needs usually 30hours & 4 cycle of refinements.
• An unplanned rework/rerigging/etc cost... what? 10% of the initial model?

In short: What do you need as artists to make a job which decrease misunderstanding and maximise satisfaction on both sides.

If someone would send me some good specs, please, contact me at spatlabor at gmail com

Bye