Blender 3D Character Artist — 2D Concept to Game-Ready Textured Mesh (+ Rig)

We run a short-form comedy channel with two recurring characters. One of them currently exists only as 2D art — we need him built as a proper 3D character we can light, pose, and eventually animate. We've already burned a cycle on this and want to be upfront about where it went wrong, because avoiding that is the whole job: We generated a high-res sculpt (~415k faces). The look was right, the topology was unusable — non-manifold, no clean edge flow, impossible to rig. We retopologized it down to ~8k tris. Clean and riggable, but it lost most of the character's detail and stopped looking like him. We could get the look or clean geometry, never both. We need someone who can deliver both — the standard answer being a clean low/mid-poly base with the sculpt detail baked into normal/AO maps, but we're open to your approach if you have a better one. THE CHARACTER Chubby, goofy, friendly — a lovable doofus No teeth, no tongue — open mouth reads as a simple shape Stylized/cartoon proportions, not realistic anatomy We have finished 2D concept art from multiple angles that defines the canonical look. This is the source of truth — the finished model needs to read as clearly the same character. MILESTONE 1 — Textured Mesh ($115) Target: 2–3 days Clean, manifold, quad-dominant topology with proper edge loops around mouth, eyes, and joints Poly budget: roughly 15k–25k tris (flexible — we'd rather have a few thousand more tris and keep the detail than hit an arbitrary low number) Fully UV-unwrapped, no overlapping shells Textured and color-complete — PBR maps (base color, roughness, normal). Sculpt-level detail baked into the normal map where it helps. Deliver: .blend source + .fbx + .glb, plus textures as separate files at 2K This milestone is intentionally rig-free. We're testing the mesh against existing assets in Blender and one other program before committing to a rig. MILESTONE 2 — Rig ($100) Kicks off after Milestone 1 is approved Standard Blender armature with IK on arms and legs, working weight paints, no candy-wrapper deformation at shoulders/elbows/knees Basic facial controls for mouth shapes and brow (no full FACS setup needed) Must also export cleanly as R15-compatible for Roblox Studio — 15-part hierarchy with correct bone naming (LowerTorso, UpperTorso, LeftUpperArm, etc.) Deliver: rigged .blend + .fbx, verified to import into Roblox Studio without errors WHAT WE PROVIDE Shared on contract start: Finished 2D concept art (the canonical look — front, side, and reference poses) Our previous sculpt attempts: full-res .glb, the retopo .fbx/.glb, and the failed rig attempt — useful as reference for silhouette and proportion, or ignore them entirely if you'd rather build fresh from the concept art Sample videos showing the character's personality and how he moves in 2D WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR Blender-primary. Maya is fine if that's your pipeline, but deliverables must open cleanly in Blender. Portfolio showing stylized/cartoon character work with visible wireframes or topology shots. We specifically want to see your edge flow — a pretty render with no topology evidence doesn't tell us what we need to know. Experience taking a character from 2D concept through to a game-ready rigged asset Please don't apply if: you only do realistic human characters, you work exclusively in sculpt/render without retopology, or you can't show topology in your portfolio. IN YOUR PROPOSAL The keyword TACO3D 2–3 stylized character examples with wireframe or topology shots How you'd approach the look-vs-topology problem described above Realistic turnaround for the textured mesh Confirm you can hit R15-compatible export for Roblox Studio