pay per asset

Busterizer

How do you determine how much money you wish to be paid if there is a potential employer that says something along the lines of: "payment is per asset and we need 50 of them"? I know how to calculate my monthly/hourly pay, but this is different, since I can't say how much time will it take me per asset, some of them may take more time and some of them less time.

Swizzle

If you know your hourly rate, why can't you simply log hours you worked on a given asset and then bill for those hours?

If they're paying on a per-asset basis, then you should be either billing them upon delivery of each asset, or providing an itemized invoice if you want to be paid in some sort of lump sum.

Deathstick

Compare what they're asking of you to how long it took you to make a model of a similar quality and level of detail. Account for time it takes to figure out how to make something that's new, and account for the time it would take to make additional changes/revisions if requested.

low odor

I would always lean on the high side of your estimate for per asset, especially if you expect anything other than light iteration. And just like Swizz said , just work out your typical hourly. Per asset can be a win if you can churn out assets quickly, but it can be a huge money pit if you under estimate, or get stuck in a situation where a client wants to constantly iterate.

Neox

I only do this when i know as much as possible about the upcoming assets. ideally a testproduction has taken placen already, and concepts for a lot of these are already done.
But yeah it is risky we had productions where we did that and the intial concepts have beennsubstantially simpler than theblater ones, but contracts have been signed.
I prefer workorders a lot more, smaller batches to sign off each time for the next,say 1 month or 2 months.

Also your estimates can usually only work for time without iterations, you don't know them, how they tick, how picky they are, where they are picky and so on. From time to time we have a simple iteration multiplicator, like 10 or 20%, other times iteriations get handled seperatly.