How much does an animal cost to make
- Thread starter tigris115
- Start date
Its a rough estimate between much more then you think and literally not knowable
Thats most likely insider knowledge and we will never know. Maybe some 3d modelling websites can give you an idea how expensive these can be at the bare minimum
Well I built a moose from scratch once, back in the Jumanji days of "photorealistic" animals. To do that, you have to study RL moose first. Their skeleton, the way they move, their muscles, their fur, that they can kick efficiently in any direction, and a crapload of other things. Building the 3D model is time consuming (start with a box), but manageable within a week or two (I had a working rigged model in a day). Animating it, that's probably more time consuming. All this depends on your end goal. Getting things 90% right can be done in 50% of the time it takes to get it 99% right.
HeatherG
Volunteer Moderator
There are teams that work on the animals. I don't know if you can put a cost on the work of creating just 1 animal.
I'm just guessing, but people have to decide on the animal, create a model, color it, animate it and definitely goes to the sound department. So there are many people involved.
How about the budget of various packs? Or even how much a pack is needed to make to be considered "breaking even?"
Straight up none of our buissness
Discussing anything along that lines will upset shareholders very greatly, devs will of course keep knowledge like this privately
It would have to take into account sales projections and resource/employee budgeting, which would almost certainly not be general knowledge. We could probably figure out what percentage of a pack's cost the average animal is. I say average as it no doubt takes more work (more time, more money) on some than on others.
I'm going to try to roughly figure this out. Keep in mind the animal costs are an average and are in US dollars. Some would be less, some would be more. If you take the scenery packs have 3 animals less than animal packs, the first thought would be that the scenery is counting for $5USD, as that ends up being about $1 per animal left over. But comparing the animal pack at $1 per animal doesn't work out though as that's only $8.
It can't be $1.50 per habitat animal as that alone is $10.50 and then the exhibit animal on top of that. If we took the cost at $1.25 per animal though, that's $10, including the exhibit animal in that average. 5 animals on this would be $6.25 so three would be $3.75, or roughly that amount for the scenery pieces. I'm thinking average animal cost is probably in that range. Some may cost out to more than $2 and some may cost out to less than 50 cents so that $1.25 sounds about right to me.
Without budget knowledge we don't know how it much it actually costs. If they're looking at selling 1,000 units $1250 per animal which sounds low given the turnaround time. Maybe they're projecting to sell at least 10,000 units, to get $12,500 per animal. Maybe it's twice that, or 5,000.
Argh. Then you have to figure in marketing which I didn't even consider here. That's probably not too much cost per pack to translate to animal, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was 10% of of the budget.
Anyways, that's my best guess on the first steps. Apologies community managers, if taking this close of a look at it may be against the rules, if it is, please feel free to delete my post. I don't want to cause any trouble. Thank you!
I'm going to try to roughly figure this out. Keep in mind the animal costs are an average and are in US dollars. Some would be less, some would be more. If you take the scenery packs have 3 animals less than animal packs, the first thought would be that the scenery is counting for $5USD, as that ends up being about $1 per animal left over. But comparing the animal pack at $1 per animal doesn't work out though as that's only $8.
It can't be $1.50 per habitat animal as that alone is $10.50 and then the exhibit animal on top of that. If we took the cost at $1.25 per animal though, that's $10, including the exhibit animal in that average. 5 animals on this would be $6.25 so three would be $3.75, or roughly that amount for the scenery pieces. I'm thinking average animal cost is probably in that range. Some may cost out to more than $2 and some may cost out to less than 50 cents so that $1.25 sounds about right to me.
Without budget knowledge we don't know how it much it actually costs. If they're looking at selling 1,000 units $1250 per animal which sounds low given the turnaround time. Maybe they're projecting to sell at least 10,000 units, to get $12,500 per animal. Maybe it's twice that, or 5,000.
Argh. Then you have to figure in marketing which I didn't even consider here. That's probably not too much cost per pack to translate to animal, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was 10% of of the budget.
Anyways, that's my best guess on the first steps. Apologies community managers, if taking this close of a look at it may be against the rules, if it is, please feel free to delete my post. I don't want to cause any trouble. Thank you!
They would never go for that anyway.
Edit: and you'd never get the "crowd" to agree on what animal should be funded, either.
Again, this seemed a good idea in the middle of the night
It's the same idea you had in the past of Frontier opening up polling for animals to be added. Sure, conceptually it seems like a decent idea, but then you have to wonder; if only one out, let's say, five animals on a list is chosen to be added, what happens to the other four? What if the vote is super close? If they're going to make all five anyway, why bother with a vote at all?
In this case, you run into the same problem, except now people are actually putting money forward. Inevitably someone has to decide where the money goes; what animal you want made. If we pretend that for whatever reason Frontier actually agrees with this, then who decides what animal the funds go towards? If you opened it to a vote, then inevitably someone is going to say, "You know what, I didn't want A animal, I wanted B animal which I voted for, give me my money back." It gets messy.
Community input as it currently is works well; we can throw all our ideas in the wind, and we have no clue as to how the decisions are made, so we can't exactly complain. If a generally popular animal gets added, like the maned wolf (I use this example because it is clearly popular, but it's an animal I honestly don't care about having in the least, whether I use it or not), it might as well be sheer coincidence.
I don't think it can be measureable, because every animal would come with its own difficulties.
Speaking as a software developer, I can't put monetary value on a single part of a project. I can put value on a project as a whole, which in this case would be a complete pack.
I imagine they have a dashboard with tasks to do, and every employee gets as much done as they reasonably can. They don't have direct value for every task.
Speaking as a software developer, I can't put monetary value on a single part of a project. I can put value on a project as a whole, which in this case would be a complete pack.
I imagine they have a dashboard with tasks to do, and every employee gets as much done as they reasonably can. They don't have direct value for every task.
Yaa and I think male lion is the toughest. I remembered Aurora design took so long and still unable to remake the ZT2 lion.
Though that was mostly because they were doing it all for free and some prominent members of their team left in quick succession, IIRC.