Rant: It can't actaully be this hard to follow instructions
polycounter lvl 7
Too Long, Didn't Read: If you want something done right, don't use freelancer.com
I'm working on an erotic comic (none of it vanilla), and until I get a new laptop, I'm doing it on my weekends. I'm doing the backgrounds, props, textures, and some character modeling myself, but sexy models are time consuming to make, so I've been getting them from DAZ and Poser, converting them to .fbx and pulling them into maya. DAZ Studio sucks in too many dimensions to name, and I'd only been inside it for 15 minutes before I realized I needed to work with something more...robust.
The problem is that .fbx can't handle DAZ's skinning system. It's some tri-algorythmic thing they claim is superior to DQ or linear, and it might be. The model I was working with was certainly boned like crap so it must.
(Seriously. Two joints in the spine, one in the neck, no forearm joint. It would be a hilarious joke to hand it to someone.)
My problem is that I hate skinning with a burning passion, and there was no way the .fbx imported skin was going to work, so I got on freelancer and posted the job. The lowest bid range I could choose was $1-$250 dollars, so I went with that. In literal seconds, two groups posted with the maximum bid, and in two days I got all the bids I was going to get.
I decided I hate skinning $50 much, and went with that girl. I technically hate it $99 dollars much, because in college I took $100 to skin someone else's model. This might be the origin of my hate.
Turns out the girl was a guy, but it's an understandable mistake, because every one of the people that bid had an attractive woman as their avatar, even the $250 bidders, that must have companies of 15 people or more.
I explained exactly what I needed. It's for a comic, I said. No animation, I said. Full articulation of the hips and legs, lots of articulation in the tongue, and I need her toes to curl individually. (This is for sex, after all.) I told him DO NOT RIG HER. "I have specific things I want from the rig, and I don't want to have to explain them all."
I send it off and a day later he sends it back. Most of it looks good, but I have a couple of problems with the skin, so I point them out to him and ask him to fix them.
He hits me back the next day to say he's having problems with the hair. She has mesh hair, which isn't ideal, but she's not animated, so making particle hair collide with her body would require animating her into the pose and running simulations until I find what I like. This would add four to eight hours of work to every pose, so fuck that noise.
He wants to put joints in her hair, I say that's fine. He disappears for two days, and them messages me that he has a simulation system for her hair, but can't make collisions work. Again she's not going to be animated, so I don't need collisions, and I tell him that.
He dicks around (this is where I start swearing about it) and then comes back with a model with a few more joints for her hair. That's fine, but there are still weight problems, so I ask him to fix those, as well as the first fucking set of problems that are still there.
And then he disappears again, this time for four days, and messages me that there are problems with the hips and can he please move the bones. Sure.
Nothing for four more days. Then he tells me he's done and emails me the model. Which he rigged.
Which he fucking rigged.
You'll recall that I told him not to do that. And it's a rig that does nothing for me. He's done it in IK. Again I'm not animating this, so why would I need anything driven by IK? Sure he's got switches, but he's used maya switches instead of joint drivers, so they're shit. And I don't need to deal with any of that crap. So I point out that I told him not to do that, and ask him to send me an earlier skinned model. He says he rigged her and then skinned her. Not my pipeline, but what-the-fuck-ever. So I tell him to delete all the connections and send it back to me. I can do that myself but I'm paying the guy, and I need to go to bed.
I get up, look at the thing and find out that he's re-boned the entire model. And he's redone it with fucking every bone I told him I needed, gone. She now only has one toe, and she has no bones in her tongue. This is for sexy. I need those for sexy.
I give the fuck up. It's been two weeks to finish what was maybe an eight hour job, and I can't deal with his horseshit anymore. So I pay him off, tell him our professional relationship is at an end, and sincerely hope never to speak with him again.
I don't know what I've learned from this, but whatever it is, it's fucking enraging.
I'm working on an erotic comic (none of it vanilla), and until I get a new laptop, I'm doing it on my weekends. I'm doing the backgrounds, props, textures, and some character modeling myself, but sexy models are time consuming to make, so I've been getting them from DAZ and Poser, converting them to .fbx and pulling them into maya. DAZ Studio sucks in too many dimensions to name, and I'd only been inside it for 15 minutes before I realized I needed to work with something more...robust.
The problem is that .fbx can't handle DAZ's skinning system. It's some tri-algorythmic thing they claim is superior to DQ or linear, and it might be. The model I was working with was certainly boned like crap so it must.
(Seriously. Two joints in the spine, one in the neck, no forearm joint. It would be a hilarious joke to hand it to someone.)
My problem is that I hate skinning with a burning passion, and there was no way the .fbx imported skin was going to work, so I got on freelancer and posted the job. The lowest bid range I could choose was $1-$250 dollars, so I went with that. In literal seconds, two groups posted with the maximum bid, and in two days I got all the bids I was going to get.
I decided I hate skinning $50 much, and went with that girl. I technically hate it $99 dollars much, because in college I took $100 to skin someone else's model. This might be the origin of my hate.
Turns out the girl was a guy, but it's an understandable mistake, because every one of the people that bid had an attractive woman as their avatar, even the $250 bidders, that must have companies of 15 people or more.
I explained exactly what I needed. It's for a comic, I said. No animation, I said. Full articulation of the hips and legs, lots of articulation in the tongue, and I need her toes to curl individually. (This is for sex, after all.) I told him DO NOT RIG HER. "I have specific things I want from the rig, and I don't want to have to explain them all."
I send it off and a day later he sends it back. Most of it looks good, but I have a couple of problems with the skin, so I point them out to him and ask him to fix them.
He hits me back the next day to say he's having problems with the hair. She has mesh hair, which isn't ideal, but she's not animated, so making particle hair collide with her body would require animating her into the pose and running simulations until I find what I like. This would add four to eight hours of work to every pose, so fuck that noise.
He wants to put joints in her hair, I say that's fine. He disappears for two days, and them messages me that he has a simulation system for her hair, but can't make collisions work. Again she's not going to be animated, so I don't need collisions, and I tell him that.
He dicks around (this is where I start swearing about it) and then comes back with a model with a few more joints for her hair. That's fine, but there are still weight problems, so I ask him to fix those, as well as the first fucking set of problems that are still there.
And then he disappears again, this time for four days, and messages me that there are problems with the hips and can he please move the bones. Sure.
Nothing for four more days. Then he tells me he's done and emails me the model. Which he rigged.
Which he fucking rigged.
You'll recall that I told him not to do that. And it's a rig that does nothing for me. He's done it in IK. Again I'm not animating this, so why would I need anything driven by IK? Sure he's got switches, but he's used maya switches instead of joint drivers, so they're shit. And I don't need to deal with any of that crap. So I point out that I told him not to do that, and ask him to send me an earlier skinned model. He says he rigged her and then skinned her. Not my pipeline, but what-the-fuck-ever. So I tell him to delete all the connections and send it back to me. I can do that myself but I'm paying the guy, and I need to go to bed.
I get up, look at the thing and find out that he's re-boned the entire model. And he's redone it with fucking every bone I told him I needed, gone. She now only has one toe, and she has no bones in her tongue. This is for sexy. I need those for sexy.
I give the fuck up. It's been two weeks to finish what was maybe an eight hour job, and I can't deal with his horseshit anymore. So I pay him off, tell him our professional relationship is at an end, and sincerely hope never to speak with him again.
I don't know what I've learned from this, but whatever it is, it's fucking enraging.
Replies
Don't use someone for an important job without interviewing/vetting them properly.
Document/simplify the requirements into bullet points, so each can be iterated individually and checked off, for least confusion.
Don't go for the lowest bids.
Oh, and pics or it didn't happen
No comment to add, just found this set of sentences to be funny.
I definitely did the second one.
The third one would have been tough, because it he was the second highest, after the companies that were clearly running an algorithm to make the highest bid the second a job posted.
As for the fourth, I don't know what kind of pictures would prove that this happened, so here's a picture of a tarsier skull that I happen to have on my computer to troll my psychiatrist with.
But one thing I know is that there often is a reason why they ask for such low prices
Also if I ever needed someone to freelance out something, I'd ask people I know are good if they know someone etc. I'd say it lowers the chance of having to deal with someone like in your situation!
<< that's frankly upsetting to read as someone who as been working professionally as a freelance artist for couple of years. The quality of the work done goes with the price you paid. A lot of freelancer will charge couple hundred bucks a day for this type of work, sometimes around 50$ and hour or more.
I'm not a rigger so I can't say how long that type of job really takes, but if we say 8h at 50$/hours we are talking about a 400$ job here, you paid 50$ can't really be pissed at the quality of the work you got at that price.
Not all freelancer do this stuff fulltime, if you have some delay to be respected you need to tell the freelancer, otherwise they might be doing that in their lost time etc,
TDLR : If you want professional work done, you need to hire a pro and pay them a salary that's fair for the high quality work that they do. If you pay peanuts to an amateur, can't be surprised with the results
Don't expect good work for shit pay. If he worked on it for 8 hrs that would be 6.25 dollars an hour.
I would guess 3 days is probably accurate for a rig job. Which means you paid him 2 dollars an hour.
Also I just wrote the exact same thing @TeriyakiStyle wrote without reading his reply. +1
Unfortunately when modelers talk about "rigging a model", they actually just mean "skin weighting it". Whereas when animators talk about "rigging", what they mean is "building a control rig" - hence the widespread confusion.
(also just to be clear the OP is likely talking about Freelancer.com, not freelancers in general)
yeah, that was my suspicion as well, wanted to make sure I was on the same though xD. for me the word "rig" kinda includes the bones as well, and the other stuff is "controllers".
Just wanted to make sure I didnt missunderstad some very specific workflow that OP was angry about lol
If you want to use someone that do this full time, even for 8 hours of work which it didn't turn out to be you need to add a couple of 100$ to attract.
His rig was actually really pro. It's just exactly what I told him not to do.
Outsourcing (or hiring freelancers from overseas) is only cheaper if you invest time to make a great brief and set up a watertight contract that specifies how, what, when and how things should be done and under which conditions you accept the work. Then you must monitor and give feedback during the process. That's the management-side price you pay for cheaper artist hours. Otherwise, get a local guy and pay professional rates.
Thanks for clearing that up
If you were expecting anything of quality to amount of going to that kind of site, you were wrong.
Not to mention, I read the whole thing and didn't get that rigged and skinned were different; could that have been what caused the confusion for the freelancer as well?
Then a few lines of conversation later, "All I need is the skin weights painted. Please do not rig the model."
Edited to add: His question preceding the admonition not to rig was "Should I add controllers and rig it?"
If this was an error is syntax, I have no idea how I could have prevented it.
He just deleted all the bones that I told him I needed, or I probably would have kept it.
And just a thought:
It helps to dumb down conversations if you realize the person is not the best at English by removing unneccesary words for example:
"Full articulation of the hips and legs, lots of articulation in the tongue, and I need her toes to curl individually. I told him DO NOT RIG HER. "I have specific things I want from the rig, and I don't want to have to explain them all."
"Articulate ( Or a more easy to understand synonym ) hips , legs , tongue. Each toe moves, skin only , no rig."
Or even send pictures to explain what you want exactly.
At the end of the day , you'd get upset that all these people can't understand you , but putting yourself in their shoes and trying to understand where they're coming from and what they might have interpreted really helps.
I know from my experience living abroad that in countries where English is not the mothertongue , communicating with hands and feet and extremely simple words can get points across.
*self satire