Selling 3D Art and Assets

For the past two months, I've worked quite a bit on creating models for Sony's Player Studio. If you don't know about Player Studio, it is a program allowing people outside of Sony to create cosmetic assets for players. Each asset is sold in the Sony marketplace in a few of their games like Planetside 2, Everquest, and Everquest 2. After hearing about how modelers have made over $10k for 8-9 models, any all inspiring new artist would be drawn to this. After my time with them, I found that it is very misleading. 

Before I explain exactly how things work in Player Studio, I want to mention that such a organization is a great cornerstone for 3D modelers. There are many other online companies that do similar things, but allow you to sell your assets to the public, instead of being confined to a player base that only really exists in a single game. So to list a few sites I've seen to be extremely promising, I will tell you of a few, and what they do. 

First off is Turbo Squid, who is very well known for selling 3D models and assets to the public. Next is Shapeways, who let's you sell your models to the public to be printed for the customer. Then there is CGTrader, where you can sell your models as assets, or as printable models. All of these have been known to be great for 3D artists, but will not be able to vouch for them just yet. I promise to give full reviews as soon as I have a few models run through them. 

Now back to Player Studio. This is how it works, you create whatever you feel would be great for one of their games, and then the designers of the game will rather tell you it's not right for their game, and needs revision, or they will accept it and finish it for you. It's great for artists starting out, since the in-house designers will help make your model look perfect for the game. The bad parts are as follows. It seems almost nothing is actually added to anything but Planetside 2. With that said, many artists have come made great models, and then left as their models were excepted, but were never added. 

The Player Studio team never mentions how long it will take to be added to the game, and until you ask, the time can be from one month, to one year. Not only that, it depends on what the designers feel their game's marketplace needs, but they never mention what the current demand is. The PS forum is where everything is discussed, and even though there are lots of style guides for each game, and asset type, none of them are correct. This is something you don't even learn until you create something, and have it declined due to being "incorrect with current standards". Regardless, players from games will make idea suggestions of items they would buy, but when such items are created, they never see the light of day. 

So that's how Player Studio works. I don't want to discourage anyone from using it as a place to get started before moving on to a public marketplace, since the PS community is great for giving your constructive critique, and getting use to creating assets to sell. As an added note, when creating assets for PS, there are a few asset types I would stick to. First are "helmets" for PlanetSide 2. These are the main commodity of PS. These seem to get priority over everything else. Second are the Vehicle additions for PlanetSide 2. These are fairly new, and designers are all about adding these. If you want to create something for Everquest, or Everquest 2, stick to housing items. Everything else seems to get ignored.

So that's it. Sorry to make this mostly about Player Studio, but I wanted to make sure to mention everything for anyone wanting to know more about Player Studio, and how the system works. I promise as soon as I sell anything at one of the other sites, I will make a post as soon as possible. Enjoy, and happy modeling!