3D Game Artist (individual - no agencies) for a Pixar-style VR Dodgeball Game

INDIVIDUALS ONLY. This is a long-term engagement with one artist. Agencies, studios and teams: please do not bid. Bids from agencies, or from accounts that would hand the work to someone else, will be declined without reply. If you are an agency and you still feel you must bid, start your bid with 'Outstanding Agency' or you will be rejected without even reading your text. Also note: the budget/milestones will be discussed in more detail once the finalists are chosen. WHAT THE GAME IS Dodgeball is a 3-versus-3 team dodgeball game for VR arcades (PC VR on Valve Index, Unity 6 with URP, 120 Hz, and for standalone Quest 3 and Pico 4 Ultra). Two teams of child animals teleport around an arena and hit each other with balls. One hit and you are out. Our inspiration is Smashbox Arena, but the game targets to be a lot more professional. The cast style is a modern Disney/Pixar animal-film look: child animals about a metre tall, soft fur, oversized heads, glossy eyes, red or navy jerseys. WHAT YOU WOULD DO As the sole artist on the game: - Characters. 16 ship (8 female, 8 male). For each you receive a concept turnaround and an AI-generated 3D model (Tripo). You clean it up to a professional standard, hand-finish 4K textures, build a proper hand-made rig (the generated rigs are not usable) and animate five required clips per character (Idle, Crouch, Out, Celebrate, IdleGag), plus three optional ones. - Arenas. Nine bounded, multi-level arenas, 50 x 50 m. The environment style is not decided; finding it with us is the first job. Then concept art, a modular kit, the dressed Unity prefab with colliders and lightmap UVs, baked lighting and LODs. We are aiming for professional look, with downsampling for lower end devices - Props and effects. The ball, the Ball Launcher (a toy, one in each hand), the teleport telegraph, power-up balls, and hit, catch and ghost effects. - Interface. Title treatment, key art, in-world panel skin, score strip, spectator-screen overlay, portraits and icons. - An original character-selection set that shows off the cast at life size. The attached brief has the full requirements, the fixed values (sizes, rig, LOD budgets) and six suggested milestones. Please read it before bidding.

WHO WE ARE

LOOKING FOR - One person who models, textures, rigs and animates stylized characters AND builds game environments. If you are strong in one and competent in the other, say which. - Proven Unity delivery: prefabs, LODs, lightmap UVs, URP materials. - Hand-built rigs and weight painting, and animation on your own rigs. - Comfortable starting from AI-generated meshes and improving them, not only retopologising them. - A portfolio of work you made personally - Written English good enough for a daily message exchange. No time-zone requirement. HOW WE WORK - Fixed-price milestones through Freelancer, released on approval. You quote each milestone against the brief. We start with Milestone 1: environment style exploration with us, a style bible, and one character finished from its Tripo model with its animations as the quality benchmark. If that goes well, the rest follows with the same artist. - Reviews happen in the headset on our side. You get notes with screenshots and/or video. - Deliverables are source files plus FBX and PNG exports, in meters, Y up, facing +Z. TO BID Start your bid with the word LAUNCHER so we know you read this. Then give us: 1. A link to your portfolio, and the three pieces you personally made that are closest to this style. 2. One paragraph on how you would clean up and re-rig an AI-generated character. 3. The quote for the entire project will be ignored as we will discuss as we go. Within your proposal text, please indicate the cost and time estimate for Milestone 1 only. 4. Confirmation that you are an individual and will do all the work yourself. 5. Your availability in hours per week over the next few months.