i recently gave some advice to this other flash developer. he wanted a 3D heart animated. i told him i could easily do that for him. he mentioned he was familiar with swift 3D as well. so i went to 3dcafe, grabed a heart mesh, and exported a heart (one frame) for him to look at and see if he wanted something like that. he said that was perfect, and if he could buy the mesh off me instead of an animation. i told him that ethically, i could not. if he wanted it to beat or be otherwise be animated in some way, i could help with that (3d max). it was not my mesh. so instead i gave him a lot of information about where to get it, gave him a url to a mesh search engine, and offered all i knew on dealing with 3d cafe and their licensing requirements, as i have delt with them a lot in the past. i asked him for a small consulting fee if he found this information useful. and overall, he spent 30-60 minutes of my time. i figured being upfront and honest with him, and giving him a lot of useful information would be considered valuable to him. i guess i was wrong, since i haven't heard back from him since. even with one kindly-worded follow up email on my part.

so my q is what do i do in the future in this kind of situation? do i say "i have some valuable information, and if you want it you can hire me as a consultant?" that seems strange. i almost want to publish this guys site so you guys can go spam him or suck his bandwidth or something, but that'd be evil right?

i just thought that was totally unfair and dishonest of him to just take my valuable information that i acquired through hours of research and run. it's like he filled his tank with gas and didn't pay the attendant. i even left the dollar amount open to him, with some recommendations based on my normal hourly rate.

any ideas? suggestions? for now or the future? any similiar stories?