   Low Poly Coop -- Seeking Artists to Join our Longrunning Community Project
Team name: Low Poly CooperativeProject name: Open Content Game Art PacksBrief description: The main goal of the coop is to continue to create a library of game art that is freely available for independent game developers to use in their own projects. We welcome contributions from artists of all skill levels. Just be aware that your work will be donated to the community, although with the intention that it will always be accredited to you. We have always prided ourselves on being an extremely productive and communicative team, and up to this point, we have allowed the group to grow and change organically. Now, however, we are looking to open the group up to more contributors and for the first time I am coming here to ask for help with a more formal recruitment message. If you are looking to join a team that will help you get your work into the hands of serious developers (our first content pack has been downloaded over 5000 times and is being used in dozens of nearly complete projects) and if you want to work on a project that will actually get done (we have released more than 50 complete models to date, have another 100 in the queue and source material to last for at least another year). In short, if you want to work with a team that has and will actually get things done, contact us.Target aim: All of our work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license and is free for indie developers to use. We also have an active and friendly community if you wish to just stop by for learning new things and we also welcome help and feedback from non-artists.Compensation: The compensation you receive is the satisfaction you get from helping this great community of indies grow.Technology: As much as possible, we prefer to use open source art tools for the creation of our work. Many of us in the group love to use Blender for modeling and the GIMP for textures, but for the most part, you can use whichever tools make you feel most comfortable and that you have available, as long as you can export the files to standard formats such as .obj for models and .png for flattened textures. For the technical artist position below you must know, or being willing to learn, Blender and the Torque dts exporter. We are also looking for people with expertise in exporting to other game engines. The work we create is low poly, single diffuse textured and most definitely not next gen.Talent needed: There is an ongoing need for artists of all levels of skill and experience. In fact, much of our own first work was done as part of the coop and we encourage artists looking to try and learn new skills to come by and join us. However, most immediately, we are trying something new for us and will be building more structured teams than we have in the past. For our immediate need, we will be building our first team which will consist of the following artists and general helpers working on an urban-themed content pack:3D Modeller. We are looking for an artist who can build simple low poly (300-600 tris) models from photo reference and can unwrap their own models. About half the models are done and samples of similar work can easily be downloaded from our site.3 Texture Artists. We have found over the years that this has been the most time consuming and subjective task in the pipeline and this is why I am asking for more than one texture artist to help finish up this pack. For this content pack we are looking for artists who can create believably realistic, although not necessarily completely accurate, diffuse channel textures for urban themed environment models. Most of us work at 1024 x 1024 and downsize the art to 512 x 512 png formatted files.Technical Artist. We are looking for someone who knows how, or is willing to learn from the tutorials on our site, to set up files for exporting from Blender to Torque dts format as well as other standard formats, and can do all of the final file wrangling for the distribution. Team Facilitator. I am currently the facilitator for the team, but I would love to have someone grow into this role so that I can concentrate more on doing the art and being a facilitator for the coop on the whole. The team facilitator should be able to do any of the other tasks reasonably well, will take ownership of getting the project done, and will work on all the more intangible aspects of the project, like communications, publicity, collecting source material and recruiting. Art Generalist. This is for people like me who do not want to stick to just one job on a team and always wants to learn new skills. Any team always ends up having bottlenecks and this person would be able to step into any role that needs filling, so a wide range of skills would be most helpful.Team structure: I am Scott Hsu-Storaker and I am one of the two founders and facilitators for the coop. Team structure has been very organic and flexible over the years, with more than twenty artists contributing to the effort at various points. Most of the past contributors have recently been busy with other projects and Real Life and will contribute from time to time as possible, but we are looking to create solid teams for finite amounts of time and commitment to complete each of our upcoming content packs. Right now, we plan that a team that is fully staffed will be able finish one of these projects in six months with each person putting in two to three hours per week.  Website:Our blog, wherein I go on at length about our goals and artistic ideals.Our Beginner's Guide to Joining, with much more information about how you can help if you wish.Contacts: If you want to join or would like more information, please contact me at scott@bowzizzer.com or by posting a message in the lounge section of our forum or here. Please be prepared to show some samples of your work.Previous Work by Team: Here are some examples of our previous completed work.Additional Info: We are a team that knows how to deliver and we plan our projects to be easy to manage and realistic to complete. Here is your chance to join a team that gets things done and to have your work seen and used by thousands of other members of this community.Feedback: ANYThank you for your time in reading this. I hope to hear from some of you.Stay free.~ Scott ~   
  Just have to throw in my support for the coop.  We aren't using free models, but if we were, we would be using the coop's for sure.  Scott has been doing the coop for quite a while now (read: years) and deserves some recognition for sticking with his mission.  Their stuff is quality, and any artist would learn a lot by pitching in.  Keep up the good work Scott!   ;  This looks like a very good idea, but I think you might benefit from some better web software. Like your forum for instance. phpBB 2.x is ancient, and it has security issues. phpBB3 RC5, is a massive leap from where 2.x stands, and it is very stable as far as I know. SMF is definately also worth checking out, and their 2.0 version (which imo will be superior to phpBB3, but it's all about preferance really) will be out in a few months. You can easily transfer all the accounts and their posts etc. over to either of these forums.I'm also a bit confused about your main site. If at some point you'd like to extend your site, like adding special galleries or advanced user spaces, maybe even trying to make something similar to the major art communities, wouldn't it be hard to do that using a blog? The way I see it you'd be better off using an extendable CMS like Joomla! or Drupal maybe, that is if you don't have any talented web developers.On a completely different note however: I'm a part of a crew creating a rather large-scale RPG. We're going for free distribution of the game. Do you think after the game is finished we could upload a pack of all the models in a pack to your website? The models are between 500-5000 polys. Keep in mind that this is completely hypothetical though, just wanna know how you would deal with such a situation.   ;  @Jerky. Thanks for the words of encouragement, Erik. It's always great to be in touch with like-minded people in the community. Project Wish is something I've watched for a long time and it's fantastic to see a team committed to the long haul.@Sadr. Thanks for the great comments. The issues about ease of use and how we can scale the team up with a more proper framework that you bring up have been top of mind with us for a while. With all the time crunches in our lives we have always ended up defaulting to working on the actual artwork over concentrating on changing the systems by which we work. This recruitment is in large part an effort to free up some of our team's resources (namely my time) to address those same shortcomings. So, your suggestions are greatly appreciated. As far as donating a chunk of work, we have mostly concentrated on producing new work over being a storehouse for complete work because there are a couple of great sites that are doing that or planning that, but since another developer also asked the same question we may start planning to make that a possibility in the future.Thanks again -- I am open to any comments.Scott