My advice on producing 3d films/animation in 2019

Someone emailed me to ask me some advice on producing 3d animation/films over the internet- hiring freelancers and the like-

I thought my replies might be helpful to others to I'll post them here-

Q-  I would greatly appreciate any advice regarding hiring talent, paying talent, publicizing the work, or any creative advice at all. Thank you very much for reading, and I look forward to a response.

A- As far as hiring talent goes- I've really only hired voice actors and a few 2d artists- 

For the voice acting I've done that through the internet and worked remotely with really good results. I found all my voice actors on youtube- I just searched for peoples voice acting auditions or for youtube people that did impressions of famous voices- I only chose people that displayed the skills I wanted in their demo's- so the "audition" process was me listening to their material and making lists of what people would work for what role- 

I think the important takeaway for me from that process was that I only hired people who had already displayed the talents I wanted- so there were no surprises when it came to do the voice I needed-

For my last film I am Nightmare- I hired 3 voiced actors and between them they did about ten voices- I purposely chose people that could do a variety of voices for that purpose- working with a large group of voice actors can be difficult so try and get some voice actors who can do multiple voices-

I paid them through Paypal- After we agree to the price- I pay half up front and then half on completion of the work- NEVER pay them all of the money up front- I've done that a few times for artists and never received the finished work- you've got to keep them a little hungry for $ so they will finish the work on time.

I highly recommend the 3 main voice actors I used on my last film

Ricky Grove https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0343988/

Calvin "Jazz" Walker https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5850686/?ref_=tt_cl_t8

Anna Brisbin https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5588182/?ref_=tt_cl_t2 

The production strategy I would recommend is not a typical one yet but its something I'm doing now and I predict will be more popular in the future- produce your animation using a game engine- Use Unity https://unity.com/ 

IF you use Unity you will have access to thousands of really affordable/free assets including art/animation/fx etc from the Unity Asset store https://assetstore.unity.com/- If you are resourceful in using Unity and pre-made assets(you can modify them to make them your own, changing materials/textures etc) you can create work cheaply with a TINY team- even on your own that will look like it was made by large teams for a lot of $

So I say- use Unity- get/buy pre-made models- customize them to your liking and enjoy the realtime rendering in Unity- As far as production goes- you'd only have to pay voice actors and a sound designer/mixer if you don't do that yourself-

I recommend that because that is what I am using/doing now- if you look through my youtube channel at my music videos- the last 6 or so have been made using Unity with the techniques I've described-

Q-  Thank you for suggesting using Unity to produce the animation, I have watched your videos and understand. Real-time rendering and customizing pre-made assets sounds like great benefits, but do you have an opinion on using Blender as an alternative? Blender seems to be fully free, customizable, and Blender's EEVEE engine is a real-time renderer. I wonder if the free Blender Version 2.79 (or the upcoming 2.8 in July) would give the same amount of customizability and potential as Unity's $125/month Pro Plan?

I feel confident in being able to work with a team of voice actors, sound designers, and artists remotely. If I were to put together a team of 3D animators, would communicating among them remotely be functional as well?

A - Blender is a great tool for the creation of 3d/cg assets- the reason I steer more towards Unity is that you can utilize pre-made assets from the asset store that you modify slightly instead of making them inside of Blender etc- It takes a lot of time to create such assets and hiring cg artists to create new ones will be much much more expensive that purchasing collections of pre-made assets- there are also a lot of free ones that can be modified-

Blender is a useful tool in this process though- I would use it to modify pre-made assets and use it to make new assets if you cannot find pre-made ones that work for your use-

So I say- go out and see what pre-made assets are out there- collect/buy all the ones you need then if there are any lacking then look to hire someone to make them for you or model them yourself-

For example on my current big game project- I purchased/repurposed a lot of low cost models from the Unity asset store and Turbosquid- I tweak them slightly to make them "mine"

I'm not familiar with Blenders animation/timeline engine so I can't comment on it when it comes to producing animation inside of it- the pitfall to watch out for with "realtime" renderers is that they sometimes require expensive GPU's to work in realtime or near realtime- With Unity I'm using a 4 year old $120 gpu and I get realtime renders-

Another positive for Unity in my perspective is that it makes it very easy to create an executable out of your film/project- that allows you to market/sell it in a huge market like Steam as an interactive film etc-

I just see Unity as a much more progressive pipeline-

To produce films inside of Unity you can use the Free version- there is nothing in the paid versions that will enhance the filmmaking process-

Working with freelance modelers/animators is going to be very difficult- that's another reason I recommend going for pre-made assets- I think if you hire freelance artists you are going to spend most of your time trying to wrangle them- trying to get them to stick to deadlines and give you the work you want- I would try to avoid that- when shopping for assets you get exactly what's shown- when hiring people to make art- you don't know what you are going to get- and you'll have to pay more/wait to make any changes etc-

I've looked at art station myself but haven't used it- my current strategy is to contact Unity asset store creators whose models I have purchased/used- when purchasing models-especially character models- the character topology/Uv's/polycount/Rig etc is very important- when you buy/use their assets you see how they do all this and can test it within your pipeline- so you know whether their methods fit with what you're trying to do-

For example- I purchased assets from this publisher- and I like the way they make things so if I wanted to hire them I'd email them at the address listed on their asset store page- https://assetstore.unity.com/publishers/27420