One model = three assets - the animated umbrella

This is an example how one can make a lot more (hopefully) from just one asset.
I modeled a simple umbrella some time ago for use in my rendered illustrations. That's just one of the images I did:



After a couple of months I came back to this model to add some details and came to the conclusion that I could also sell it as a 3D asset on Turbosquid. I needed to add some details obviously and rig the whole mesh for animation. I ended up with a detailed mesh and a cloth simulation for the opening sequence.

The result of this little extra work were three new assets:

1) New rendered illustration:



2) Animated clip for stock footage (uploaded to Pond5)



3) 3D model for sale @Turbosquid



Theoretically I could take this idea of reusing a single piece of work even further and write a tutorial about creating this animation. This is quite an interesting project with various skills needed (modeling, texturing, rig set-up, cloth sim etc. ) so I'm sure some people might have been interested, but for now I will just use this model for more stock footage and 3D illustrations.
You can also find that clip on Youtube here

3D Stock Talk

A new forum dedicated to selling CG related products is up and running for two weeks already. It's called 3D Stock Talk and you can find it here:
www.3dstocktalk.org
Of course the similarity between the discussion board's and this blog's name and the logo is not an accident as I'm the man behind the new forum.

So far he have over 60 registered users, some of them owners and/or CEOs of the sites where you publish your products. So you can get some interesting info directly from th people running the business. For example Matt Anderson from The3DStudio.com is very active on the forums and I must admit I learned quite a few interesting details about the industry from his extensive posts.

There are a lot of industry veterans on the forums and I hope that the very lively and informative discussion will continue.

Skeleton animation

Enough of the "theory" and statistics. It's time to show some of the products I'm selling on the sites mentioned before.

Here is one of my clips available at Pond5. It's a short clip of a human skeleton. Should be useful for medical, educational or scientific tv/movie productions. Like all my clips it's rendered in 1080p HD resolution.



Go to Pond5 to view the clip online and find additional details about this animation.

January Summery

January and the "lost season" of Christmas and New Year is over, so it's time for a small summery. For the last three months I worked only for micro stock sites with still renders and animations, so I didn't upload even a single 3D model. It took quite a lot of hard work and long rendering hours (most still renders I do are about 20-25Mpx and all animations are full HD clips). I managed to complete about 150 still renders and 12 new animations.
As I mentioned sales were pretty OK on all sites, except iStockphoto (I will explain why later). Here is the percentage share for individual sites in January (only still images included):

As you can see Shutterstock is by far the leader with all other sites far behind. As for portfolio size I have about 30% less images on other sites compared with Shutterstock, mainly because Shutterstock's uploading is pretty fast and so are the reviewers. That's also the reason why I have only about 10% of my portfolio uploaded to iStockphoto - the upload process is very slow (no ftp option) and the review process is incredibly slow (more or less a week for every picture). So theoretically it could be my second best selling site, but I'm not sure if a simple multiplication of the download ratio is any good.

I'm also pretty glad that Fotolia is moving to video and that will be a new opportunity fand new profit) for people selling footage. For now their video site is still in the beta stage and opened only for contributors, but hopefully they will start selling as well. I whish they will be as good as the two sites I 'm currently using: Pond5 and Shutterstock.