If I become a PA, can I just dedicate myself to re-texture other PAs models?
l_riefkohl_ferrer_1923365ed0
Posts: 166
in The Commons
I'm learning to use Substance Designer and I think that I can get nice results retexturing models available in the store. I was wondering if it's allowed to retexture other vendor's models and sell those textures in the store. Also if I'm allowed to fit old clothes for newer models and sell that new version in the store. Please provide details. Thanks in advance.
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Not sure but I would like to know if I can sell just textures too here? I have an old computer but still can do basic textures for poser based figures such as Aiko 3 and Victoria 4. I cannot do anything fancy like iRay or Genesis 8. Or does the Daz store only for iRay stuff and Genesis 8 stuff? I would love to create stuff for Steve, since I think I got him and he works with the version of Poser I got.
On texturing, you can sell new textures for existing products. You will have to create your own texture though, not paint over an original one. As for clothes, you cannot sell (or give away) any part of an existing outfit. Even if that outfit it made to fit a new figure it is still the same mesh and cannot be redistributed.
You can make texture packs, though I think Daz tends not to take them. Refits would ned the agreement of the original artist. You might be better doing some free texture sets to show your skills, with a view to teaming up with a modeller who wants help with texturing.
Yes your allowed to re-texture something and then sell those textures as an add-on.
probably does not hurt to ask the PA though, I read one case on facebook where someone did a texture set and the PA got shirty even though it might have generated sales for her item which was a requirement, it was on Renderosity not DAZ though, possibly DAZ communicates better between vendors on such things or simply as suggested by Richard don't tend to take them.
+1 - Definitely team up with a modeler. There are quite a few successful vender team-ups that create great products. Creating an entire character may not be your cup of tea, so teaming up with someone who likes to do the scuplts but maybe doesn't enjoy texturing would be a good idea.
Rendo sells nice texture packs for daz store content. Some of the better ones in fact, like OOTs. I wouldn't limit yourself to just selling at DAZ.
Texture set addons sell best if they are released when the model is released. Addons for popular items may sell after the model is released.
Well, I'm definitely interested in seeing where this goes... :)
Difficult bandwagon to jump on to, when I first started I could get up to 1000 downloads for one freebie texture set, and yet only get 12 or so sales on a pack containing several, more detailed, clothing textures. And I priced as low as the brokerage site would let me.
"Can I just dedicate myself to re-texture other PAs models?" The answer is yes. It is possible. Now for the qualifiers: it won't be quick or easy. Daz will take items if they have compelling promos, and they think they can sell the item, but they typically do not take texture expansions for existing items. They have the sales numbers to show that texture add ons sell best when released with the original item, and after that window it is diminshing returns that they rarely find worth the effort. Add ons for non Daz figures are best to be submitted to the store selling the original figure, and Rendo is a great place to find/sell add-ons for just about anything.
Are you serious, dedicated, and passionate about being a full time texture artist, or are you looking for something fun to do in your spare time? There is no right or wrong answer, and the steps to take are largely the same.
So, how to proceed: 1. Learn your texturing software inside and out. Substance Painter is great piece of software, but you will have to do more than use the stock smart materials if you want to get noticed. You need to learn to make your own materials too. Lots of vendors, and quite a few users have Substance Painter so there is no point to putting out textures that people could make on their own. Make it unique.
2. Re-texture everything in your content library to learn what you like to texture, what you don't like to texture, and get practice. Learn the steps involved starting from exporting the object you want to texture, creating templates, texturing the object, setting up the surfaces for the chosen rendering engine(s), saving presets, and packaging the new content for distribution, making sure there is no derivitave material. Still with me?
3. Show off your work. If you want to sell texture sets, you need to know how to make good promos. If you want to team up with a modeller, they will want to see what items you have for sale, or at least a gallery of your work. Build a portfolio.
4. Never stop learning, and never stop growing. The thing you make today has to be better than the thing you made yesterday. Every item you create gains you experience.
cheers!
Words of wisdom.
If you do start doing textures, please make one of them for the Dystopian Bar LOL
You would probably do better if you did freebies for a while to build a name for yourself plus it helps you build your skills. Once you have a bit of time under your belt then try selling some. As already stated you should release at the time of a release of the clothing itself. You probably won't make a ton of money on doing texture add-ons. They usually only sell for $7 and you half to split that with the brokerage not including any sales that are running. You in reality would only be making $1-$2 per unit sold. Like I said start free till you get a catalog then approach PA's who do clothing and show them your work and see if they didn't mind an add-on being made for it and release at the same time.
There are plenty of DAZ characters that I have bought that are texture set + morph presets from the DAZ Originals Head Morph Pack and DAZ Originals Body Morph Pack for the different Genesis iterations.
To answer without getting into the marketability of the concept, the Daz EULA specifically allows for this, as long as you observe the constraints spelled out in the document. The EULA should always be your first and final resource.
As a user, other than character textures, I can say I almost never purchase re-textures these days, unless they are remarkable in some way -- excellent fur or leather, for example, or a shader that far exceeds what the original PA provided. That said, I'm probably not a typical D|S user. There are lots out there that want pushbutton solutions, so your success here is in finding, and cultivating, those users.
So with that said: simply throwing some product onto any digital marketplace site is not the way to sell these days, 3D assets or otherwise. To really succeed you need to directly engage with your customer. Build a reputation by posting freebies (ShareCG, etc.). Create a Web site. Provide hints and tips in a blog or newsletter. Post renders using your textures everywhere you can (without spamming, of course). Developing personal relationships and leveraging customers is how you can succeed.
Bear in mind things like light sets are basically re-textures (99% are basic shader or light setting variations, often from tips and techniques people learn about here), and these can perform very well for vendors. So blanket comments about this or that having low sales potential really depend on exactly what you're selling your enhanced retextures for.
Yeah, given there are shader packs to retexture many different products with one purchase, it's an uphill effort.
I'm only likely to do it for large architectural environments where retexturing dozens of stuff would be really annoying and/or the textures supply details wrapped specifically around that geometry. So, for example, textured pipes or whatever that transform bare walls.
It's already been stated it's allowed and the OP should just go look in the DAZ Store itself that given the number of new characters that get offered in the DAZ Store weekly that creating new textures for those existing models is in fact the best way to earn money in the DAZ Store. There is not even a doubt about that. Genesis 8 itself is most just an upping of iRay 'realism' to sell more texture sets.
You should do the trivial task of creating a character morph preset to enhance the texture set's saleability although I will tell you a good texture set on G8F/G8M I will buy sans character presets or uniquely created morphs for a target character because that is the most difficult thing to make unique once one owns the DO morph products and FaceGen.
There are a large number of PAs who do almost nothing but texture sets over at Renderoisty... in fact, I'd estimate that well over half the Rendo store is texture only add-ons, many for models in the DAZ and other stores, and with a huge amount of duplication where there may be twenty artists who've all made after-market sets for the same item. DAZ used to do a lot of texture only sets in the V3/V4 erea, but the fact that they don't carry anywhere near that kind of percentage on the newer generations would seem to indicate that they don't think texture sets are as attractive a product to stock, on average. I can tell you that once I figure out that a PA is a texture only PA, I tend to rarely go back to look at their stores, as if I see something I like and I don't already have the original product, it usually ends up being a more expensive proposition to buy both than it would to just buy a new, complete product. Another thing to be aware of is that there are a lot of "orphan" sets out there, where the texture is still on the market but the original PA's store is gone or they've pulled the product, so in a very real way being a texture-only PA means that you're tying your future sucess to the sucess of other vendors.
I would say if you're going to do textures, consider doing a few prop add-ons as well.
I started out as a texture artist.. gave up and learned to model because I got frustrated with the terrible UV mapping on almost all the things I bought to try to make textures for. It's gotten a little better now from what I can tell, but still not great. If you want to poke at it as a bit of extra income it's fine, don't expect to make a lot of money on it unless you can be super prolific. And yeah, extreamely likely Daz won't take them unless it's ready to go when the product it's for goes live, prefferably with a bundle option (thus needing a PA that makes clothing to approach you while the product is still in development to start working on a texture expansion for it (don't ask me, I already have two artists I work with that would likely be quite pissed if I offered to someone else without asking them first, if they both couldn't do it >then< I'd be looking for someone else but that's never happened yet), so you're only real option is Rendo, at least starting out. Execption being popular clothing from Plat Club, they will sometimes take add-ons for that later(ish) if it's really good (and I do mean really good - like Moyra level good)
But if you have those skills, then a stand-alone set of props would actually be more likely to be commercially successful. The minute you base a product on another product, you reduce your potential pool of sales from everyone who uses D.S. (and possibly Poser as well) to the much smaller subset of people who've already bought the other product. And you would be surprised to find out how small some of those groups of owners actually are, as I've heard more than one vendor complaining about a product's sales not breaking the double digit mark.
I have no ideal of Rendo product sales but i was rumaging through the freebies yesterday and saw that the top 5 of downloads all-time there are less than 100K each since I think made available between 1999 - 2005 and now it is 2017 so 12 - 18 years of downloads those freebies have had. If you figure a product were to sell, which they probably won't most products, that many sales at $5 a product you'd only get about 2 years salary for a degree professional in places like San Francisco with sales of 80k a product sans 50% taxes (excluding doctors and other highly paid white collar workers).
It certainly won't hurt you to try if it is a hobby you enjoy.
I can't remember the last time I bought a texture addon. Unusually, I did wishlist one for a clothing set recently but ended up making my own for the product during a bit of downtime and liked it a lot better. The most time-consuming thing about it was setting up the PSD file as I went along so that I could make further variations a bit more quickly in the future if I wanted to, and even that didn't take long. I know that good textures take a fair bit of work but if you want to take them on because they seem comparatively easy next to other things you could be doing as a PA then don't forget that it's this ease which will have a lot of people doing their own and will be knocking a chunk out of your potential market size.
Easy or not, it all takes time and if you want to get any kind of financial return for yours then it might be better spent on learning how to produce something unique that other people might one day contemplate retexturing instead. On the plus side, ownership of Substance Designer presumably means that you're saving money on textures even if you're not making any. I've finally just got my mitts on Marvellous Designer, and although I've forgotten a lot of what I learned during the trial period I've already re-created a few simple things that were in my wishlist and know that there were a few recent purchases that wouldn't have been made either if I'd got the software sooner. What I am so long-windedly trying to say is that if your creations can rival something you were genuinely intent on buying (or already did) to the point where these purchases would not be necessary and the software has saved you that money, then it's likely there's a market for them. If you would not have paid out good money for them then it's probable that no one else will either.
Create something you can really see yourself buying. Unless you're buying a lot of texture sets, they're probably not that thing. Good luck :)
Freebies are possibly the worst way of estimating demand, as many people will simply download anything that looks like it may be potentially useful at some vague poijnt in the future rather than have to bother with having to come back and find it later, and others will download the same item multiple times as they've either forgotten that they already have it or where they put it. As a better general gauge on sales, I look at the provisions Rendo makes for the clearance of old product. All it takes to stay out of their clearance section is one sale every 180 days... which seems like a crazily low bar... yet despite that, a number of products from major artists who also sell at DAZ often end up in their clearance area.
And, of course, if you sell through someone like DAZ or Rendo, a large chunk of the sale price goes to them. There are clearly at least a handfull of artists who do make good money in this business, but they tend to be the ones who crank out products at a machine like pace, make extremely top of the line items that command higher than normal prices, or the ones who luck out and produce something that ends up becoming a standard part of everyone's tool kit. And even then, you'll notice that many of them still have other gigs besides just producing content for DAZ. I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of people who make content for this industry do it because they love it rather than the odds of it making them rich.
I disagree. Less than 100K downloads is a very small number for a product that's been downloaded almost 20 years. So knowing that I told them the math of what they would have earned over 20 years if they had earned income of $5 a download for such products. It's up to them to decide whether they enjoy that sort of work to make a go at it or not, not whether or not we judge that they are likely to fail at it.
Besides that, the market is growing and it has to be said, there are much worse ways to swindle one's time and spend one's money besides learning to make art as a hobby.
I'm happy if I sell 150 copies of a clothing set in the intro period, after that the sales got down to almost nothing, like 1 or 2 copies a month unless my whole store is put on super sale.
I've sold texture add-ons with props and was able to quit my day job. In fact, this set, https://www.daz3d.com/a-major-upgrade made over $6k the firsrt month. Attention to detail and how you present it is what counts.