No idea where you got your info from but it is plain wrong. We pay our artists more. Any western artist needs to make a certain amount of money to stay afloat.
Ace: as a freelancer you ask what you think your time is worth. A lowpoly hamster might be fairly easy, but you'd assume he/she usually does more demanding stuff. Odds are that this person charges that amount because they're good enough to ask it, or because they have so much work already they're in effect 'selling' their…
Whoops, late to reply. I'll keep it rough, but all current- and next-gen stuff I've been working on breaks down about like this... for only the modeling to final texture phase, characters are 4 - 6 weeks (sometimes 8), vehicles with interiors are 4 - 8 weeks, third person weapons are about 2 - 3 weeks, I haven't done…
How does time scale when you get up to more complex characters? Well, personally I think of the old ship analogy. It takes a boatyard a year to build a one hundred foot ship, and it takes that same boatyard one year and three months to build a 200 foot ship. Probably not accurate because it's just a saying, but it makes…
Charging by polycount makes no sense to me imo. Someone could make something with 10x as many polygons as needed with poor optimization quicker than someone who makes the topology efficiently while containing more detail. I personally consider style, complexity of the concept, and a comparison to another models level of…