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DAZ Productions, Inc.
224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
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© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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To be a content creator requires many different talents, but to me, the most important is stamina.
Say you think of a great idea for a product. (This is already difficult because there's so much content out there). You spend weeks or months making the product, submit it and it's accepted (something that's not guaranteed either). Great. You now have 1 product, and if it does well, you may make enough to cover your costs and time, and maybe invest in some new software/hardware. (And don't forget you have to pay taxes). If it bombs, you start all over again.
So what next? Well, this is where stamina comes in. To make a living, you have to have a lot more than 1 product. So can you keep on coming up with great ideas month after month, year after year? It's not that easy. By the time you get to 5/6 products, ideas start to run out, or they've aleady been done. Waaahhhh!!
On the bright side, if you find a successful niche or style, you can do pretty well. It just takes a long time to get to the point where you can relax. (I've been with DAZ for 12 years and I'm not there yet - lol). But I enjoy what I do, and don't have a boss yelling over my shoulder.
Content creation is something you have to really, really want to do. When I started, making freebies 15 years ago, there were very few handy tutorials. Most 3d techniques were mysteries known only to a few dedicated souls, and I learned everything by sheer persistence. Ask, ask and ask again. Trial and error. Frustration and cursing. That was about the size of it in those days.
Today, things are slightly better for aspiring creators. The internet is a huge resource of knowledge and you can find almost anything if you look hard enough. But you still have to want to do it, and you still need time, energy and talent to be successful. Plus stamina, of course.
mac
It's been 5 years since this post. A lot has changed. How are content creators feeling about making a living from this in 2018?
My sales continue to go up year over year, so I guess not all that badly on my end.
That's good to hear. Collective3d and SickleYield, I've purchased some of your products before. Keep up the good work!
Curious as to why you state "a lot has changed" since I don't see it, care to elaborate?
I'll quote myself five years later. Still holds true. especially the part about motivation...
Do what I do, make stuff that's so bad nobody wants to pirate it :)
Sure. Since 2013 the quality of products has significantly risen. I think it's because of the new rendering system, iRay, and the quality of Genesis 8, and now Dforce is making products even more appealing. All that is what I'm referring to when I say a lot has changed. If you look at products produced in 2013 vs. now, and you'll see a big difference in their quality, in my opinion.
Ah, gotcha. Thanks for clarifying. I was just wondering as I see PAs come and go and still see conversations about sales or lack of and from my experience in the gaming world, piracy is nothing if not worse, so was looking for any positives which is why I asked. I would hope there are more users for DS in the past 5 years since that is what would drive sales the most and maybe make it a little eaiser to make a living
That's not true! I love your little vignettes, especially your sci-fi ones, but the horror ones are good too. I think your work is great! =-)
Aw, go ahead and make my head even bigger than it already is.
The technology changes and you adapt and move along with the tide or move over and get left behind. I really appreaciate those PAs that have kept up and obviously those that posted above continue to be ones I support here at DAZ. I also think things like Facebook, youtube and more can help with exposure and obviously sharing a tutorial builds good will. My income has dropped dramatically (not a PA but became disabled) so when I have a little funds and there are 2 choices of items, my "highly supportive" vendors ALWAYS get my money first!
I wish I had the knowledge to create the some items. I want to do clothes but Organic forms have NEVER been in my wheelhouse... and I am spread too thin to do a full package. I really need to find a PA that might be able to work with me or that I could do some grunt work with. Probably my best chance to make a bit of money... really not money just more DAZ assets, LoL!
It also has to do with the upgrade to modeling and texturing software. We have a lot better tools to work with then we did 5 yrs ago. It cost us PA's an extreme amount of money and didn't turn profits those yrs but it was well worth it now. We usually use probably 5 products in our pipeline. Others use a lot more or less. This is a very hard profession and full of severe stress. You can work on something for 3 months and it releases and you only sell a minimal amount, so you just lost out on 3 months of work.
Surely you jest. LOL
I honestly can't see why people would steal stuff that's so reasonably priced. I mean, I could have bought a nice car by now, but I sure don't regret buying any of it ;). Including a respectable amount of your stuff C3D. LOL
Laurie
There are a ton of great tools that have come into common usage over the past few years. The two primary programs I use are 3ds Max and Substance Painter. I still occasionally use Photoshop, largely for creating decals and brush presets for Painter. I'd love to have Mudbox or Zbrush, but there's only so much cash in the budget. 3d Coat looks like a decent alternative as well. And there are certain Max plugins, like GrowFX, that I don't know what I'd do without.
I want to become a PA artist, and have tried, but I'm still learning. There's so much you need to learn, it's not even funny. I'm already in the camp of purchasing a lot of software to achieve this goal and haven't finished any of what I started yet. I'm really close though.
Interesting thread to revive. I remember reading it at the time, but I guess I didn't comment because I was not in a position to. 5 years ago I had been a part time PA for about two years with about a dozen items in my catalog. I was a full time travel agent, and my husband was in retail. We had both had a few products do well enough that we made the same amount of money on them as we did at our day job in a month. It was then that we decided that we could be full time PAs, if that was the main goal of our lives. We knew it would be about 2-3 years before we would be in the position to take the leap. We both spent two years working full time out of the house, and put in another full time hour's worth at creating product, building our catalogs, and most importantly building our skills. Three years ago, we both quit our day jobs and became full time PAs. A year ago, we both got second, two day a week out of the house, part time jobs, to cut down on the stress factors and give us piece of mind for the lean months.
Agreed, by leaps and bounds the quality of products has gone up. The amount of functionality or number of presets included in most products has gone up. The tech we used has jumped by leaps and bounds. The renders have improved 1000%. Iray was a game changer. Allegorithmic software was game changer. dForce was a game changer. What is next? How fun to find out.
Everything everyone said five years is true. Passion, dedication, hard work, focus, determination, creativity, time management and budgeting are what you need to do this full time. The payoff is not commuting and not having to compete with other people to get a week off at Christmas. The downside is self employment taxes, purchasing health insurance, and really hoping that your next product pays you at least minimum wage so you can pay your bills that month. It is HARD. It is WORK. It is the most REWARDING thing I have ever done.
I kind of wish everyone would get boot camp learning how to create content before critiquing... because wow, there is a lot of work people don’t notice
But as for making a living... it’s hard to beat this kind of work for part time work; you work at your own pace and what you want to work on.
After thinking about my post, I'd like to respond the original question more bluntly. Is it possible to make a living wage by making content for Daz Studio? Yes. There are enough buyers at present to sustain the market. It is also possible to make a living wage at being a concert pianist, a watercolor painter of landscapes, novel writer, food blogger, Magic Card player, youtube blogger, jewelry maker, etc. If it is your passion, the thing you would do if no one paid you to do it, the thing you live for, you can do anything.
Are you going to spend a year learning how to model and texture, crank out 10 black dresses for the flavor of the day Victoria figure and retire? No.
Passion.
I'd like to very strongly agree both with your previous post and this one.
This job is one of my passions. I want to do it badly enough that I'm willing to figure out what sells vs. what I want to make and try and make both of those work. I'm willing to sit up stupid late to get something in on time for the privilege of having the weekend off (and that IS a privilege you earn, with this job). I'm willing to do extra time before vacations so I can afford to be away. I'm willing to buy my insurance and deal with a fairly complicated tax situation filing quarterly as a contractor. I'm willing to always be learning, every single day - new software, new techniques, new ideas. I've never had a job I liked as well. I hope I never have to find another one - and if I do, I hope it's still in 3D.
It's hard as hell, and you have to really want it. But I wouldn't give it up for the world even though I rarely manage to make minimum wage.
Well we know the old saysing and they are so true...
"If it was easy everyone would be doing it!"
AND
"If you DO what you LOVE, you will never WORK another day in your life!"
I hope to join this august group one day.
...personally I'm working at learning modelling to create items primarily for my own use in illustrations for the stories I work on. Went into business for myself 25 years ago (unrelated to CG art) and had a pretty rough time (particularly all the bloody taxes I had to deal with, felt I needed a degree in tax law just to make sure I didn't make any mistakes [which I did and it cost dearly]).
Even though some here like DzFire, Fisty, and Protozoon have created incredible models with Hexagon (which I am also back working with again since the Beta fixed a good part of the instability) instead of some multi thousand dollar professional software suite, I still cannot see myself making the jump to do this for a living. Partly this is due to my previous experience, and partly due the fact I have no access to seed capital with which to set myself up properly (and pay an accountant to deal with all the tax mumbo jumbo so I don't get stung again).
At the most I might eventually put a few freebies out on ShareCG (once I figure out how to package them for Daz), but that will pretty much be it. This is why I have a tonne of respect for the PAs here and elsewhere as indeed the road is a tough and sometimes treacherous one to follow (having been there once).
I guess my real passion has become my stories, and I look at creating models for them as more the means to give them a unique quality, rather than as an end.
Iray is an example of new technology that affected PAs more than customers. I had a major slowdown during the first days of Iray, and it took me months to really get a grip on it. It wasn't just learning a whole set of new materials, but also the lighting (for promos). It *might* have been easier for PAs who only deal with skin (although that's doubtful, because skin is a whole new thing in Iray), but I had to nail metals, plastics, glass and every other danged material you can think of. That went on for about the first year of making Iray products. Every pack I made had some new problem. And on top of that, for every pack I had to attempt to recreate those same materials in 3DL. Sometimes it just wasn't possible, and I still remember the feeling of gloom when I had to release my first Iray-only pack. I was sure it would bomb. Well, thankfully it didn't, but even now, I'm still extremely disappointed when I can't manage a 3DL version of something.
So it never really ends. You get to a point where you think, 'Wow! I'm really getting a grip on this!' Then along comes some new technology and Bam!, you're a newbie again. Mind you, I'm not really complaining. If I ever begin to think I know it all, it'll become just another boring routine job.
Bottomline, if you want to make it, you have to be creative, and tenacious, on a regular basis.
Come up with new ideas every couple weeks, sellable and marketable ideas, convert those ideas into tangible form, heave the technical know how to deliver them for testing, make sure they pass testing, make compelling promo art to sell them, and then do it all over again the next week, and the next, and then the month after next.
And all this is done on spec (speculation) with no guarantee of a sale. So you can do everything right and still you might not make money on a product cause people don't buy it. Or they wait to buy it when it will net you 10% of the value, And on occassion you can go through all the work, and Daz rejects the product for any number of reasons and it never makes it into the store. This is not a business for the faint of heart.
You've got that right. It also helps to be in a situation where the people around you understand that your income is going to fluctuate -- sometimes wildly -- from month to month. $10,000 in March, $600 in April, $4000 in May. Up down, up down. It's a roller coaster for sure. Thankfully my landlord for the last 6 years or so is hip to the idea that I'm probably only going to be able to pay him every 3 months. Sometimes to catch up, sometimes to pre-pay for 2 or 3 months of rent at a shot, sometimes to barely scrape by for this month. But it is definitley stressful.
On the earlier subject of Iray, I actually breathed a sigh of relief when that was added to DS and it actually accelerated my product creation. I was raised on Mental Ray in 3ds Max and 3Delight consistently bewildered me. Switching to Iray was like coming back home. The materials in Daz Iray are still nowhere near as complex as what you can do in Max with Mental Ray, Iray, or Vray, but it's a hell of a lot better than it was earlier on with 3Delight. If anything I hope the materials and shaders in DS become even more complex, because it allows you to do so many things you can't do now, like masking tiling textures or assigning multiple different shaders to a single surface.
Personally, I'm always amazed at some of the stuff the PA's produce. And then you see it selling for some ridiculous price like $10 or $20. I mean I can't even figure out how they make the skin textures, and the morphs, and the details of freckles and toenails and hair and so on. I've tried. I tried to make some womens' shoes and pretty much gave up. And I've made simple buildings, and guaranteed halfway through I've messed up some vertices and the wall is no longer square. Geesh. And using Substance to paint materials, and making sure they're the correct iray format, and on and on.
And don't even start with trying to make realistic morphs of someone's face to make it look realistic and interesting. I don't know how you do it. I can't. And then you hear people complaining about having to spend $24.95 on something that had to take weeks to make. If you hired someone at minimum wage to make it for you it would cost probably $1,000 - 2,000 or more.