Any CG modellers here?

Nothing special ... I thought you probably look for some help from modelers who know what to take care for when it comes to videogames.

 

Yes please. My hourly rate would be something between 30 and 60 Euro. Depends to the project and the kind of work.

 

Depends to the 3d-engine I think. And simple planar applying won't work for parts like spheres and such. Not to speak about procedural textures. But I'm not good in texturing. That's all too long ago. The last version of 3DS Max I worked with was Max5. I could export simple textured models to DirectX without problems. But I'm really not up to date ... so, modelling yes, texturing not.

If you are looking for advice, you better search Youtube and other forums I think. I can help out with modeling, not with teaching. Don't be afraid about the hourly rates mentioned above. If it's a promising project and I like the theme (same as RAZER mentioned) it could happen that I work for free.

 

Okay, we are both out of the race I think. My freelancer who made the 3D-model for my low-budget-test asks for 16 Dollar per hour and has to pay 10% to the portal where he can be hired. (He is from Europe.) Also there are some folks who offer modeling for 6 Dollar per hour - from India and such. Well, I don't trust such offers very much and since my budget is really low I didn't risk a try.

 

a few suggested websites and forums you check out...
http://www.3dbuzz.com/ - you asked about game modeling. Some of the VTMs focus on that stuff heavily, even if it is from a few years back on some of it. Click on the training link there.

http://cgtalk.com/ - general cg community. Very amazing portfolio pics in some areas. They also do speed tests, etc. in various parts of the forums. I haven't done those much lately, but they are a nice quick way to practice things if you are so inclined.

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/ - focuses on Daz's products mostly. These are newbie type products but do have some uses for more advanced stuff. There is some talk in some of the other forums here in ep about using some of the 3d models from there to print irl...

Almost every 3d package out there has one or multiple forums and websites dedicated to em...

http://forums.newtek.com/ was Lightwave's main one, but I haven't browsed it much lately since my version is a few years old now, so most of the talk these days is on features that I no longer have access to unless I upgrade, which I can't find justification to do at the moment unless I switch professions irl or something.

Spinquad used to be one of the most active Lightwave plugin sites, but it's gone away now... http://forums.newtek.com/showthread.php?133691-SpinQuad-ain-t-no-more&highlight=spinquad (they still have some awesome youtube training videos and stuff like that out there though from a few years back)...

Blender is probably something you'll want to get in to if you haven't yet... http://www.blender.org/forum/ Blender is a free opensource modeling package. There's a huge community involved with it. I never got too much in to it but may someday.

Back in ancient days Maya and Motionbuilder were not owned by Autodesk as 3ds Max was... Kaydara made Motionbuilder. Alias made Maya. Alias bought Kaydara in 2004. Alias was purchased by Autodesk in 2005. Back when Kaydara was still a company they had a freelancer version of motionbuilder that cost about 100 bucks, which was a sweet deal. I think the last time that I checked prices the cheapest you can get Motionbuilder personal edition for was over 3 grand. These high prices on all of the software is usually ongoing pricing since most of them put out new versions you have to buy yearly... that gets very expensive over time, and is why opensource stuff like gimp and blender is very nice and has a growing community.

As far as the yearly thing goes...get familiar with when the 'big' shows are as most software companies in this industry update their versions in conjunction with huge yearly shows to showcase their products and get people to 'upgrade or die' as much as possible... The big shows that happen annually that I can remember off hand are:

CES (Consumer Electronics Show) http://www.cesweb.org/about-us
NAB (national association of broadcaster) http://www.nab.org/
SxSw (South by Southwest) http://sxsw.com/
and SIGGRAPH http://www.siggraph.org/

At any of the above annual shows you can expect announcements about some newcomer company coming onstage, and/or the existing companies announcing this year's new update, which will likely cost you quite a bit of cash to get, even if you already have an older version (I think upgrades on Lightwave run around 500 - 700 bucks, and I've only done it once, upgrading from version 6 to 9, along with a freebie upgrade to 9.5)...

I stopped doing 3d stuff shortly after 2005, around 2006 as I got married back in 2005, so didn't have time to focus too much on art in the computer or irl much after that as I had a real family to take care of and spend time with... be careful about the time/life balance the more you get in to this hobby... You can spend literally hundreds and thousands of hours working on animations or stills that only are composed of a few seconds irl after you are done. Yes, it's a fun hobby, and you can do a lot with it, but if it's not your real world profession it can eat a lot of your time that you might want to possibly be spending doing something else or with someone else.... it's also pretty cut throat industry as you got to have a really awe inspiring portfolio to even get glanced at...

Companies like Caligari (which created truespace, a bit of a newbie 3d package that I focused on a bit before I got in to Lightwave) got gobbled up by Microsoft... Nowadays the big companies with big prices buy out the little guys left and right...

and things change over time...

Modo was created by a team of folks from Newtek that abandoned ship and wanted to start their own thing... I used to buy a lot of those Computer Arts mags and stuff like that that had older versions of software on the cd attached to the mags. I haven't been in to 3d for a while but if it's still the way it was back then, you really should look in to doing something like that to expand your software collection (even if most of those things are not for commercial use licenses (a good many are ) ) ... Check out the nearest big bookstores near you. I frequented Hastings, Barnes and Noble, Walden books, and a few other places for those types of mags. You can do a subscription too if you need but really, honestly to me that seemed to be a waste of money since only every 3rd or so mag had any useful info or software in it...

Game engines were mentioned... It's very ancient software by today's standards, but gmax is still out there on turbosquid... http://www.turbosquid.com/gmax Gmax was a dumbed down freebie version of 3ds max sort of that was intended for creating stuff for certain game engines when it came out... I think I got in to that for a bit because of 3d buzz or something as I think some of the vtms focused on it and quake 3 game engine integration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmax

There's a nice list of game engines over at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines
Nice history breakdown over at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_animation

I can't remember exactly which website I used to sign up for it but somehow I got a free subscription to cgw magazine a few years ago. If you can find the freebie site to sign up for something like that, do it... or just get yourself a regular subscription to it and a few other mags if you can afford em. If you can't get the real mag, at least visit the site since some of the articles are pretty technical and focus on big movies/games coming out, explaining the behind the scenes stuff, which software was used and why, etc.. http://www.cgw.com/

Cinefex is another mag similar to cgw... which focuses on the same type of stuff, but is a bit pricier if I remember correctly... http://www.cinefex.com/

Computer Arts, and Digital Arts is probably the most technical type of mag out there... but they don't focus on big hollywood production stuff as directly as cgw or cinefex. These are the mags that usually have 'cd covers' with either trial versions or older versions of software inside of those cds... usually if there is older software there is an offer for a cheap upgrade to newest version somewhere in the magazine or cd. As mentioned above magazines like these are a nice cheap way to try out different software, read about the industry, and learn a thing or three that you may not know already. Visiting forums also is smart, but sometimes magazine writers don't have the biased opinions that forum trolls and folks in the blogosphere might have...