Blender artist? Let's talk!

MakeSweet is a little “mom and pop” store for customizing graphics and animations run by Paul Fitzpatrick and Noémi Giszpenc (hi!). It grew out of a Valentine's day project many years ago, and makes money from advertising and subscriptions. You can read about how the site works in BlenderArt 21. In summary, a specially tweaked version of Blender produces renders in such a way that selected surfaces can be quickly customized later.

Far too many designs on MakeSweet are done by Paul himself, who is a programmer with basically zero artistic skills. We're looking for an artist to take on the role of producing visually appealing scenes and animations with Blender, which Paul will transform into MakeSweet widgets.

We're looking for someone to do about one design a month for us, for $20 to $100 dollars (USD) per design. Here's how we pay:

This schedule is designed to reward you for saving us time in any form, whether by coming up with a cool design idea yourself, or by thinking through how that design will feel to users of the website. As a concrete first step, we'd like you to redo this heart-locket animation, making it more photo-realistic. Send email to paul@makesweet.com with a link to a portfolio if you're interested. Please do NOT work on the animation without speaking to us first!

Usable .blends

Here's a preview of the kinds of details you'd need to think about when doing this work. We can talk you through them, but if just reading this bores you to tears then that's a good sign that this isn't the job for you :-)

• Controllable image: Your blend should contain at least one embedded image (used in any number of surfaces and textures) whose name/ID in Blender begins with “mkswt_”. In the final widget, this image will be replaced with user material.
• Complete cover: Please make sure the controllable image results in complete coverage of the parts of the surface you care about. Do not use tiling to achieve this, that will give unexpected results when your image is replaced with user images. Use a square image.
• No overlapping controllable image parts: any pixel in your scene should be affected by at most one controllable image, and just one part of that controllable image. For example, a reflection of one surface onto another can violate this rule if both surfaces have controllable images. Very mild influences can be ok, but they just won't make it through to the final widget.
• Linear assumption: the widget will assume that if a black image fed into your blend gives one result, and a white image fed in gives another, then a gray image fed in will give something in between. If your texture math is more complicated then that, the widget just won't give good results. If you map image features to surface displacements, that isn't going to work at all (we'd love if it did, but oh well).
• Blender version: don't use a custom version of Blender, stick with official releases, e.g. 2.69.
• Aspect ratio: Please render with a 4:3 aspect ratio, e.g. 800x600 pixels, unless there's a very good reason not to.