To save time and money, Companies are turning to crowdsourced design competitions like 99designs.com for Logo design & more. The idea behind these competitions is, instead of hiring one designer, you hold a “design contest” to receive 100s of design submissions, pick the best one, and then award that designer the money.

Indie and Amateur Game Devs like me could benefit from such services. I thoroughly searched the internet for a crowdsource platform specializing in 3D Game Assets: Characters, Vehicles, Weapons, etc. The results: DesignCrowd.com and many links to how InXile is crowdsourcing 3D Unity models for Wasteland 2.

Why isn't there a crowdsourcing platform for 3D Game Assets? Obviously, authoring and animating a 3D Entity requires more time... Eureka! I had an idea and it works similar to a Distributed Computing System (ie UE3 SWARM) combined with Modular Entity Construction (UMECHS).

How it Works:

• Game Devs submit 3D Game Entity Design
• Dissect the Entity into Parts
• Present Parts Design to Crowd
• Collect Parts Output from Crowd
• [Automated Assembly] Entity Variations from Parts for Review by Game Devs
  [Manual Assembly]
  • Customer Customization
  • Assisted Customization
• Customer selects one or more Entity, Parts, or Packs for Purchase.
• Publish Unselected Assets in Asset Marketplace for Sell to the masses.

There are several pros and cons to crowdsourcing contest (ie: speculative work). My Distributed Crowdsource Authoring for 3D Game Art & Animation model addresses these issues. I seek a profitable scenario for all Designers within the Model and solve a critical Asset problem for Game Developers world wide. I'm still flushing out the idea and open to both good and bad critique, complaints, solutions, etc.

Thanks for reading.

One of my biggest issues with crowdsourcing materials is the copyright problem and the reliability around it. If I paid someone to provide me with assets, then I need very strong assurance that they actually control the rights to those assets and can legally transfer rights to me. If I use a bunch of art assets, and it later turns out they were ripped off by someone and given to me without proper copyright, and I get caught with them, then I'm still violating copyright law and a paper shield of "By uploading to this server you agree that blah blah blah" isn't much against a dragon of a well funded lawsuit against me.