Commercial Sprite/Tile Media

By the end of the summer I would like to begin investing in new custom media. I have found and paid people i've run into through forums, and most of the work was far below the professional level. I think i'm done with that.

I'm looking for somewhat similar sprite/tile work that the eschalon book series provides. Pixel, or perspective rendered sprites/tiles...whatever looks good.

Has anyone paid any companies/groups/individuals for similar work, and came out satisfied? If so please share your sources...

Have you tried World Creator ? You should be able to create Eschalon style graphics with that.

V2.5 looks like it could be extremely useful for easy tile-creation. Thanks a lot for sharing that. I have only seen 1.5 in the past, and it doesn't seem to compare to 2.5.

I still need a source(s) for a complex custom player sprite system though. Talking about 4-8 direction-view system, around 20 animations, simplified cloth customization (without requiring much work for creating new wear), etc.

I don't have the artistic mind to optimize my current system. I have seen a couple games where all sprite animations are generated from 4 views (wtf?), requiring a lot less work to add in new gear, weapons, accessories, etc.

So again, if anyone knows a company/group/individual that does good work, I beg you to share your contact.

There's some very talented folks over at pixeljoint.com

They have a section specifically for people looking for sprite artists.

I'm trying to keep away from these indies from forums like that, but i'll keep it in mind (considering it's the only source I now know of).

I'm looking to spend a big coin on this, so i'm skeptical with hobbyists.

Appreciated however, and any other similar sources would still be appreciated as well.

It's probably still not what you're after but have you considered using Poser to create your animations and then 2D render them? Sometimes you need to recolour but it produces pretty good results (there are some examples in the Inet World Creator forums).
I use them as templates and then get a pixel-drawn affect by pixelling over them.

<edit> P.S. If you do go with Poser then this is excellent (although a bit fiddly)

I have already created my own sprite system and it isn't bad at all, but it is not optimized (frame-count-wise) to what some artists are capable of. I am not an artist, I don't enjoy art (except for art of code), and I unfortunately don't have all the time in the world to work on my art skills, let alone code.

For having 20+ seperate animations (climbing,attacking1,walking, kicking, etc) it has frames for each. It should not require every frame being updated for each piece of gear, and it doesn't on some optimized sprite systems.

It becomes way too tedious to update so many frames for every new piece of gear you add. If the system I required wasn't so complicated, I [u]would[u] just do it myself instead of seeking sources and blowing cash :-P.

If you got lucky you could find rigged and animated models to buy or just rigged and either pay or animate them yourself then use Spriteforge.
The upside to that is you'd have the models if you found out you needed more/other anims or wanted to use them instead. Just a thought.