can i make like 2 grand a month making content?
Mistara
Posts: 38,675
it would be nice to do something i enjoy and semi-retire.
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I think you could USING your content.
on . . uhm. . . certain sites
if accompanied by kinky chat to go with the Medusa figure streamed using Mimic live!!
and live poses on request
not poses found in the Daz store. . . .
it would have to be pretty kinky though :red:
Pfft... $2000/month.
I make so much doing this that Bill Gates begs at my door step. ;P
Now, now, Matty. just sit down and take your pills, and the nice people will be here soon with the jacket that lets you hug yourself all day.
((Such a shame... he used to be so normal, until he began thinking he was Stonemason...))
After a few years with great items and a made name... yes, you could.
Now, now, Matty. just sit down and take your pills, and the nice people will be here soon with the jacket that lets you hug yourself all day.
((Such a shame... he used to be so normal, until he began thinking he was Stonemason...))
I introduced Stonemanson to DAZ3D and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
And it only works in Poser 3... :down:
(for the record, I have never met Stonemason in person and never talked to him before joining here)
It's probably easier to make $24,000 in a year than it is to make $2,000 per month...
It would mean having an item or items that would get at least 400 purchases a month ($10 item you get half/store gets the other half) every month....where as you need 4800 sales spaced unevenly over the whole year. That doesn't figure in taxes and other costs, though so, in reality you'll need a lot more if you want that to be your net income.
It's not likely to be doable on a single item, nor with a small group of items...but with a large enough portfolio and releasing new items regularly...it should be possible.
I have one free item that has over a thousand downloads...and it took over a year to get those....most of the rest are under 300, so you may need quite a few items to get that 4800 sales/ year. Plus you'll need to expand/add new items regularly to keep the numbers up.
With all that, it begins to really sound like a job...
Indeed, content creation is time-consuming - while some people certainly make good incomes, they are not "semi-retired" as they do so.
(Edited to add vital "not" to post.)
Free items are not a good way to guage sales as free is free where as if you have to pay for it, you might just change your mind.
It is possible......but it will not feel like retirement.
It took me a long time to get numbers like that....and even now I still work more than 8 hours a day at least 6 days a week.
You have to keep up with new products, or the numbers drop fast.
I was just using that as an example that none of them were something that happened in a month...it took time. A burst of initial 'sales' followed by a dwindling amount down to a continued trickle. That pattern fits both free and sold items. Also as an example that no single item can sustain a 'store'/desired level of income.
I agree wholeheartefdly that Free items cannot be jusged as a good pointer to commercial iitems. I regularly was getting good download figures on my freebies over at Rend, one item actually had 1000 downloads in a week. But when I put a couple of packs together, with better quality items in them, and several in each pack as against one in a freebie, charged the minimum rpise Rend allowed the result was I sold 12 packs each time. And this was back some years, Poser 4 and the original propack were the current versions.
Since then a great many more people have entered the market, so competition is far greater.
Definition: "Semi-retired"... IT engineer over 45 and unemployed! 8-o
Definition: "Semi-retired"... Hit on road by very large truck. 8-s
Definition: "Semi-retired"... Half asleep. 8-P
And just to stay on topic, I tend to believe that making a living at 3D modeling is like becoming a sports star. Many are called, few are chosen. Don't give up your day job. :-(
Like any small business, you will find that you need to put far more work into it than if you just get a job at Spacely's Sprockets pushing buttons all day. Pay will probably be less, also. But, you will be doing something you like, you shouldn't have to sink your life savings into the business, risking everything, and you don't have to put up with all the crap you have to take from your boss. It might work out. It might not. You never know, unless you try.
i imagine keeping up the ingenuity for new 'desirable' items would be tough, based on completing a project week?
more snow/rain mix coming this weekend. i want to move to Florida :)
fine a mate with money - lots of money :P
to hot in the summer any way .
LOL @ Valandar %-P
...and @ Mattymanx too!
Ha! I live in South Florida and want to go somewhere further north ,the total lack of seasons is borrrreing!!And it is kinda embarassing when the the temperature hits 62 degrees and ya see people bundled up in ski jackets and muckalucs .....confuses me??!!
Sorry, I couldn't hear you over the sound of my sexy pool boy lighting my Cuban cigar with a 100$ bill.
*Falls out of chair laughing*
Seriously though: this is my first year doing my taxes and having them come to more than that, mostly because I got on at DAZ in the middle of last year. I'm not doing this part-time (I put in 40+ hours a week counting promotional, support and maintenance, more like 30 if you just count "artist hours"), and it's spot on about the annual being more accurate than the monthly.
Business absolutely fluctuates (around holidays, around people's paydays, etc.), and you will judge a product wrongly in both directions, which causes further fluctuation (sometimes it will sell more than you assume, sometimes less). The bigger you can make your catalog over time, the more stable your income from those ongoing sales.
This is an interesting thread. Taking into account that people have different skill levels and work at different rates, on average how long does it take to make various items?
1. An outfit for a Genesis figure.
2. Props.
3. A fairly detailed environment.
Does content creation get quicker and easier with more experience? Is it possible to build up resources that can be used to develop a range of different products?
There's no way you can quantify those across the board. People work at their own rates, and it's going to obviously take twice as many days or week to finish a project if you only work 20 hours a week vs. 40.
Yes it does, and yes it is, depending on what you mean by "used to develop." I don't use mesh resources by other people, period. I've used texture merchant resources for skins, though.
Yes, Misty there is way to make FAR MORE than $2000 a month making content... provided that content is in the form of crack cocaine.
You could make "slightly" less selling 3D content, but that would be far less illegal and much more boring... most 3D content creators despite their lavish and exciting lifestyles are just a centimeter shy of resorting to cannibalism to supplement their diet, which despite their exciting and lavish lifestyle (defined as "in comparison to a flea infested leper in 14th century London, during the Black Death pandemic") usually consists of discarded apple cores, pizza crusts and an occasional stray cat.
While there are are some very successful 3D artists who do live in a world where they rake in fists full of cash and party with celebrities while racing their Lamborghini Murcielagos on the Riviera on carefree weekends, they are actually so far gone they don't realize they are actually sitting in a cardboard box making zoom-zoom sounds in some urine soaked alley and they not actually zooming down Avenue d'Ostende... despite all this, these poor souls are usually the most creative (really, did you think all these sci-fi, fantasy gold bejeweled bikini armored vixens came from sane minds?)... the toll for this creativity comes at a high cost... the soul crushing search for inspiration, the psychotropic drugs, the alcohol fueled debauchery, the years in the dungeons of the 3D Content Creators Guild all take their toll... Yes, eventually you could pass into this world where you could easily create anything your mad little brain cells told you to and maybe tens of dozens of equally mad people would buy your content and you would make it too see another day... but how long would that cardboard box you'd be be living in last till it got too soggy and collapsed in on you waking you to the fact that you were not actually in a Beverly Hills mansion? If you where lucky, you be able to close you eyes and pop back into that fantasy world... ignore the filth encrusting your laptop, the piles of cat bones and stalagmites of human waste and go back to that beautiful world, keep creating and hopefully make it another day... would it be worth it for a mere 2000 imaginary dollars?
You be the judge....
I just want to be clear that this post was NOT at all paid for by the International 3D Content Creator's Cartel in an effort to discourage ordinary folks from attempting to get into 3D content creation... BUT, lets just say hypothetically it was... then I hypothetically would of asked for a BLACK 5.2 liter Gallardo NOT a Green 5.0 liter... I mean come on GREEN? What am I, Justin Beber? You don't pull up in a tuxedo in a friggin GREEN Lambo... Black... with the rear facing machine guns... Green indeed... Hypothetically though.
Yeah, but anyway no... you'll starve to death and eat all the neighborhood cats along the way, right before you go mad or something... Very bad idea... horrible... well that looks like it was over 200 words...
BLACK- 5.2 liter LP 570-4 Superleggera. Hypothetically.
@ lordvicore :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
well ... the neighborhood cats will be safe around me. :)
i should try modeling and mapping in job like hours for a month and find out if it's as pleasant as hobby like hours.
edit: factor in - working at home - doggy distractions - doggy wet nose nudging elbow avg every half hour
Now, now, Matty. just sit down and take your pills, and the nice people will be here soon with the jacket that lets you hug yourself all day.
((Such a shame... he used to be so normal, until he began thinking he was Stonemason...))
~ROFLMAO~
For what it's worth - no it's not >_<. I've had the good fortune to be modelling and mapping at work these past few months (getting paid at work rates), and it's... work >_<. Takes all the fun out of it (deadlines, schedules, subjective judgement, no time for experimentation, just plugging away to meet the (continually shifting) requirements etc) - also got to watch for the signs in Lordvicore's description above too ;-).</p>
For what it's worth - no it's not >_<. I've had the good fortune to be modelling and mapping at work these past few months (getting paid at work rates), and it's... work >_<. Takes all the fun out of it (deadlines, schedules, subjective judgement, no time for experimentation, just plugging away to meet the (continually shifting) requirements etc) - also got to watch for the signs in Lordvicore's description above too ;-).</div>
Oh heck no, I'd never do this in a cubicle or on commission. The ability to make a product and offer it to the public gives about a thousand percent more freedom if you can learn the market well enough to keep the money coming in that way.
Just as a guideline for time needed, consider this:
1 ) The time it takes will be entirely dependant on what tools you have, and your experience with them. When I first started making content with 3DS Max, as opposed to Rhino 3D, it would take me at least 1-2 days to model a given item (garment, prop, etc), a day or so to map it, a day or two to texture, and then however much longer to rig or smartparent, a day or two for morphs, then always at least a day for file cleanup and thumbnail rendering, and the rest of that day and often at least one more to render promos. If it was a multi-garment set, or a multi-prop set, add on a few more days each.
Now, however, I can model a full outfit of 4-6 conformers, map it, and texture it within the 4-6 day span it would have taken me just to model it ten years ago. Part of it is due to experience, and part is due to having tools (like ZBrush, UVLayout, and Filter Forge) I didn't have back then. Does this mean I can whip out a full set in a little over a week? Nope. It means I can spend more time adding details to the model and realism to the textures.
2 ) The number of days you work on an item also depend on how many hours a day you put into it. A "typical" 8 hour day really isn't a lot when considering what all goes into content creation - I often spend as much as 12 or more hours working, with the occasional break for letting my brain cool down, plus peeks into forums while doing things like baking texture maps, tossing the occasional comment into Chat or Skype, and so on. End result? Using the typical time needed I mentioned above, a typical outfit with 5 conformers (shirt, pants, boots, gauntlets, helmet let's say) would take me about 12 days, working 12 hours - or about 144 hours, total. At an 8 hour day, taking Sundays off, that'd STILL be about three week's work.
On the other hand, let's say I made a set of four knightly longswords. Oh, wait, I DID make them! :D So i can actually look at the files I have stored on my system (I keep track of my production files), and see the dates on them. The earliest file in that directory looks to be April 30th, at 1:37 PM (an early version of the first sword), while the last (one of the stand-in promo images I made) is dated May 4th at 1:44 AM. Four props, done in 3 1/2 days? Yes - but those were my infamous 12 hour days, so we're looking at about 42 hours work or so. On top of that, I've been told I am very fast at modelling (and content creation in general), so my times may be much shorter than most.
Now, let's get to the important thing - moolah! For the purposes of this 'chapter', we'll use the 144 hour job on that fictional helmeted outfit. Well, now that it's done, one thing I have to do is determine a price. From what I can tell, a typical full outfit will cost somewhere between $15 and $30, depending on who made it and what they want to charge. So, let's say $21.95. Now, for each sale, I'll get $10.97 (and a half cent, but let's ignore that for right now). With a "standard" 30% off in the intro, that becomes $15.36 in the store, or $7.68 for me. In order for me to make the equivalent of Federal Minimum Wage, with 4 hours of overtime per day (since I do 12 hour days), I'd need to make about $1218 or so - meaning I need to sell a MINIMUM of 159 sales in the two week intro period. Why am I only counting the intro period? Because that's where 90% - 95% of your sales are, barring a run on an older item during a weird sale. If I make that mark, YAY! I'm making as much as I could at McDonald's. If not... well, you get the picture. And you may be surprised to know that I miss the mark (adjust the number of sales up or down depending on price, and time spent) more often than I really find comfortable.
So, can you make $2000 a month in this business? Yes, you can - eventually. When your name is big enough, you have a large enough back catalogue to help you between items, and if you work your tailbone off, you might crest the $2000 a month mark. But you better do at least decent to good work, or the sales simply won't be there no matter how much time you spend getting carpal tunnel syndrome working on your products.
In any event - good luck!
pfft... who needs clothes to drive a Lamborghini? I know I dont! :D
Before or after taxes? Granted it's been many years since I did my own taxes but I seem to remember looking at the tax forms and there being an added set of taxes for those who live in the NYC area that the rest of NYS does not have to worry about.
Question is, how much do you actually need to earn to give you the 2K free and clear to live on?
Before or after taxes? Granted it's been many years since I did my own taxes but I seem to remember looking at the tax forms and there being an added set of taxes for those who live in the NYC area that the rest of NYS does not have to worry about.
Question is, how much do you actually need to earn to give you the 2K free and clear to live on?
nys we pay state income tax. another reason to move to Florida, iirc, they don't pay state income tax.
:)
seeing those guys on the fishing channel, enjoying their job, lol, wanna a fun job too.