From a fellow mod and gamedeveloper I suggest to be very careful here. It doesn't matter if you give away the mod/game for free as soon as you make a income with it. One recent example:
The trademarks for "Van Buren" as computer game are interestingly at InXile now. All Fallout related stuff is by Bethesda. Think about Project V13 how Bethesda did react to a game using Fallout imaginary and names. Also did Bethesda sue people who made Kickstarter projects for their mods. It is a income.
But there is a way around it. Don't make crowdfunding for the game keep that all completely free and as fan work. Make the crowdfunding about documenting how this game is made. For example a Patreon for a youtube series about making the game Kickstarter, Indiegogo are to risky in this case. Here people pay/donate for the youtube series not for the game.
In the end still the holder of the rights (InXile or Bethesda) can shut you down anytime. There is no way around it for you as long as you make it a Fallout game with using lore/imaginary/factions/... from Van Buren. It's a sad trough according the coyright laws.
Better to think about that now before you are at the end stage and someone shuts you down.
About Project V13, there were two projects of this name, and none of them got cancelled due to trademark issues, at least not directly. First Project V13 was part of the Interplay's deal with Bethesda, but as it was not developed in agreed time (three years I think), so by long court process, it was finally cancelled and whole IP with all rights were claimed by Bethesda. Second Project V13, which was only in concepting state under ressurected BIS (Chris Taylor was involved I think), got cancelled as it did not raised enough funds for production of the demo (pretty... odd tactics, demanding crowfunding and having nothing in hands), and as far as I know, Bethesda did not interrupt anything.
Anyway, when speaking about using of titles or IP part of either Fallout or Van Buren (whose trademark is under InXile since 2015, I know that, but as Brian Fargo stated, they are not about to use it, it was just reserved), law is explicit about this - if you are not generating income, no trademark law applies on you, plain and simple. If they did not halt projects like FOnline or Fallout Ressurection, why would they halt my project? And it does not really matter where they got their resources (these particular two did not use any funds afaik, just their hard work, but they could have done that), since they did not profit from it, no one cared.
You know, I was thinking about kickstarter, as it is, sort of, nice and official way of crowdfunding, and people feel more confident when funding there rather than giving money to some random forum/youtube stranger.
But, since there is no way around copyright law (because as both you and I said, crowdfunding would be most probably considered as making profit), there are only two options: not going around, but through - directly asking for permission from both related subjects, which is easy to do but negative outcome is more than predictable, OR drop any crowfunding ideas and beg someone to death for funding me few pounds on assets I need
). Also are many of them also contributions to the mod (Sandcrete architecture in Shady Sands for example is from Trickyvein uses Bethesda textures too) and all of them are not PBR ready.
