Advice on describing art requirements to hire 3D artist

Questions & Answers
1

I’m building a simple Augmented Reality application targeting phones and tablets and need to hire an artist to create 3D characters and animations, the characters are based on original 2D artwork.

Most of the characters are not humanoid / bipeds.

The scene is fairly simple, containing some terrain, a few props, and only about three animated characters at once.

We’ll want to be able to add more animations to the characters later.

I assume we should request the character and animations in FBX format.

Some questions:

  • Since the characters are not humanoid, am I better of using the older / pre-mecanim system ?

  • Will I be better of requesting that they do or do not include root motion ?

  • Since I’ll be wanting to add more animations in later versions, is it better to request that each animation is in it’s own fbx file ?

  • Any advice on polygon count given the max of three characters ?

  • Any other advice I can use to describe these requirements to artists ?

Thanks much for any help!

2

Usually, you want to try to avoid multiple questions in a post, but I’ll try to answer them all:

1.) Yes, you want to use generic or legacy animation.
2.) That’s up to how your project works, and how you use the models. Both have advantages.
3.) Not necessarily. You can import multiple animations from a single file, and exporting them separately is more work for the animator. As long as the bone setup is identical, you can apply animations from separate files to the same object.
4.) Totally up to your specs, mainly the platform and performance you are targeting.
5.) Be as specific as possible. If an artist has to guess, and you have to correct it, that’s wasted time for both of you, and no one likes that.