3D Character Animator (Blender) – Open Source Game ProjectUrgent

About Us:
We’re a tiny indie team building an open source demo to work with our toolkits. The game has combat mechanics inspired by the kinetic feel of Smash Brothers and the precision striking of Street Fighter. This is a paid contract position with potential for ongoing work. All contributions that make it into our demo will receive proper attribution.

Role:
We’re looking for a skilled 3D animator proficient in Blender and rigging, to create character animations that will be rendered into 2D spritesheets for use in Godot 4. You’ll animate a humanoid character model we provide. Both a side-view spritesheet and an isometric spritesheet will be created in Blender from your work.

Timeline is approximately 6 weeks. We will select up to 3 candidates for paid trial work-ups but ultimately choose one animator to continue with.

Core Requirements:

• Strong proficiency in Blender animation with a focus on weight painting.
• Be able to implement both IK and FK rigging systems.
• Experience with Blender-to-Godot export pipelines.
• Comfortable with topology cleanup.
• Familiarity with spritesheet rendering.(We plan to use the Spritesheet Renderer Blender Addon and Godot’s texture-packer plugin for the tpsheets.

Preferred:

• Experience with Autorig Pro would be best but Accurig or Rigify are also acceptable as long as we can get everything working.
• Experience with Spritesheet Render Addon for Blender or Blender spritesheets by theloneplant will be prioritized.
• Shader and visual effects experience in Blender also a plus.

Description of the Work & Animation Style:
Think expressive, exaggerated movements of platform fighters combined with the readable wind-ups and impact frames of traditional fighting games. Character shapes will have broad shoulders with distinctive top-down silhouettes, hairstyles and helmets for readability.

For 2D side view animations, the character sprites will be roughly 90 x 110 pixels. Animations will need to be readable at those sizes.

For the diamond angle isometric animations, think Children of Morta or Hades 2, we will be using a 65 degree camera pitch angle. Sprites will be roughly 48 pixels tall. This camera angle will make foreshortening a problem. To deal with this we may have to create a subset of animations for the isometric view that exagerate vertical aspects of the movements. Deliverables DO NOT need to address this right now, we just want you to know that we are aware of this and we will circle back to this problem when we have selected an applicant.

Beyond the rigging system please include the following Blender animations:

General:

• idle
• walk
• sprint
• 2-3 second collapse animation
• 2-3 second victory movement similar to something from the Megaman X series.

Combat moves:

• Weak/fast kick and punch(low, medium and high angled strikes)
• Strong spinning slow kick(low, medium and high angled strike)
• Heavy wind up punch or swing(low, medium and high angled strike)
• A charge up style strike, preferablly down swinging similar to that of a smash bros smash attack.
• One simple stun/knockback animation for when the character is hit

Side View Only Movement:

• Low, medium, high angle jump animations. The higher the jump the longer/deeper the crouch.

Object interaction:

• A two handed grab, carry and throwing of a cargo box container roughly 1/4 the size of the character. A large percentage of the visuals in this game will be the characters striking and throwing these boxes.

We plan to aim for 60 fps to keep strikes feeling distinct. As a guideline for animations, rough frames & timings are below:
Weak Strike: Frame 1-18 (18 frames, ~0.3s)
Heavy Strike: Frame 1-42 (42 frames, ~0.7s)
Charge Windup: Frame 1-18 (18 frames, loop)
Charge Release: Frame 1-30 (30 frames, ~0.5s)
Sprint: Frame 1-18 (18 frames, loop)
Med. Jump: Frame 1-9 (9 frames)
Jump Air: Frame 1-8 (8 frames, loop)
Jump Fall: Frame 1-8 (8 frames, loop)
Jump Land: Frame 1-10 (10 frames)
Jump Land Rough: Frame 1-18 (18 frames)

Naming convention format for rigging should be “L” and “R” to denote sides, lowercase descriptions with underscores separating words. IE: upper_arm.L, forearm.R, hand.L

This initial phase focuses on humanoid characters, but future work will expand into fantasy creature rigging and animation. Candidates with creature animation experience or interest are especially encouraged to apply.

What We Need From You First:

• A portfolio or reel demonstrating character animation work. Please prioritize any examples of fighting game or action-oriented animations you have done.
• Brief description of your Blender-to-game-engine workflow experience and specifically what tools you have used and your skill level with each of them.
• Your availability over the coming year. Specifically if you are interested in doing this full time.

Some Notes:
Be honest with your skill levels with each tool. We value honest communication and a desire to get-in-the-weeds so to speak.

We do recognize we are not experts in this area and are open to discussing alternative tools and workflows within the pipeline. That said, Blender and Godot 4 are requirements. If you have ideas for improving our spritesheet rendering process we’d love to hear them.

Lastly if you feel the model we have provided is not suitable let us know and we can work with you to find something similar in size and dimensions. Our goal is not to have you spend the majority of your time cleaning up topology.

Budget range:
Up to $12000

About the client
A Small tight knit team of programmers and artists.