Hi everyone.
If someone asks you to work in Unreal 4 on a project what rate should I ask for?
I have no idea.
Thank you.
$0-$100 an hour, depending on your skills.
O.k. thanks so if I am a very modest mid level I can ask for around $30 and hour and that should be o.k. I guess.
Depends on your role and your skills, an experienced animator is a bit likely to get more than an experienced programmer since good animators working independently are pretty rare. If you are a modeler you’ll have lot more competition and hence your rate will be affected by that, Same goes for a programmer.
But in the end if you got good skills and can convince your employer that you were worth it then you’re golden
ok thanks.
Wow $30 or even $50 an hour sounds low, compared to the rest of the IT industry. Is it because of the poor economy? The game industry? Or is it because the artists and modellers get paid less than programmers?
Actually I was just guessing. $30 an hour is about what junior compositors make in the visual effects industry. I dont really know, never been
hired to do game work.
i charged 10 - 20 us dollars per hour. needless to say… the work / reward ratio wasn’t worth it
Are you on a payroll or are are you an external dev with a contract? It depends greatly on that because if it’s the latter you have to pay all kinds of fees yourself (pension, insurances etc.).
$50 low? Seriously? I won’t call that low until I’m an expert professional with experience of 5-8 years or more , and I doubt anyone that experienced and professional would look for hourly work in UE4 forums , they’d rather get large contracts from AAA studios.
wait were you being sarcastic?
I think pretty much everyone will have their own story. There is no regulation and there are thousands of us. So go figure 
It is somewhat low if you’re contracted.
Hmm lets do the math for 50$/hour… on a regular 8 hour day you would make $400.
Thats 2000$ per week. that times 4.5 (rough estimate for a month) is 9000$ (±). That times 12 is 108.000$ per year.
Im not sure what the salary situation in the US but in europe that is the sort of pay you make as a senior or lead artist with 5++ years of experience, and that only if you are really f***ing good.
Considering that ‘low’ seems quite mad to me.
Or am I mistaking something here? Can anybody enlighten me?
If you are doing freelance work, you have a lot of extra expenses to worry about, you probably want to make at least 30% more than a studio job when freelancing to cover stuff a studio normally would.
So when you guys say
You mean freelance? Then it would make sense, because whenever I consider freelance work I generally value my time 2x-3x as much as at my fulltime job (character td) and end up charging 25-50 pounds per hour… Which makes more sense because I only have limited time after work that Id rather spend on other things, so I feel I should charge more. However I find it easier to charge on a per-complete-project basis. That allows me to work at my own speed (within the timeframe given by the client of course), and it gives the client a level of financial transparency that is hard to ensure when only charging by the hour.
For example for a complete character rig I take on average 1200-3000 pounds depending on the demands of the client. That price is composed of many things, from estimate working hours, to the technology I use while making the rig and the time it took me to develop that in the first place. Its mainly based on the complexity of client demands such as facial rig quality, character mesh resolution, requirement of anatomical deformation, costume rigging, custom animation control requests, aditional rig management tools such as pose/anim import/export tools, mirror and positioning tools, dynamics and baking, etc. etc.
So OP should specify in the question if you mean a rate as a fulltime job at the studio, or as a freelancer or outsource artist.
Yes, freelance. Sorry I wan’t more clear. That’s what I meant by salaried vs. contracted work basically. If you are working as a freelance artist you probably have some kind of a personal company that still has to pay taxes and other fees from the money you get from contracts, which in turn means you’ll get less money for yourself. Hence why I said 50 USD is low. As a day job I work as a software designer in a consulting firm and my going rate is usually 60-70 euros an hour, but since I’m salaried I get a fraction of that in the end. Rest of it goes to the company, taxes, and fees.
There is no such thing as an average for UE4. There are numerous different jobs that can be applied to the pipeline. Then you have to factor in that you’re talking about a globalized marketplace. An individual from the Ukraine will be willing to perform the same operations for a different pay scale than a person from the USA. Therefore it comes down to individual negotiations of what the buyer wants, what the seller wants, and how the seller compares to everyone else the buyer is soliciting.