If you are like many digital artists, animators and designers you likely have a good deal of digital art assets stored on your computer from past projects. Aside from taking up hard drive space and being available for your portfolio the assets are probably not doing much for you.
Why not start selling your 3D models, textures, vector files, photos and videos and make some MONEY!
Selling your digital art assets online can help create an additional revenue stream to compliment your current source of income. Freelance digital artists will greatly benefit from this. Anyone who has freelanced knows it isn’t always an easy thing to do. Sometimes you have projects and sometimes you don’t. During those rough down times you could be bringing in a steady stream of cash from selling your art online.
The most lucrative part of doing this is that your digital assets are just that, DIGITAL. You can sell one 3D model over and over and over again! There is no need to worry about shipping, rendering, interacting with a client or bidding on projects. Your models are simply posted online with thumbnails to view and customers can purchase your products for use in their own projects.
In order to get going with selling your digital products you want to first gather your assets and try to offer them in as many file formats as possible. This is important when considering you might have created a 3D model in Blender but your potential customer is using 3D Studio Max. If you can export all possible file types then you will be able to reach out to a broader client base.
The next step is to create some small renders which will be used as thumbnails for those browsing your assets to view. If your are selling a 3D model be sure to render the model from various angles. Offer front, left, back and perspective views. It never hurts to throw in a wire frame render so others can see the structure of your geometry.
One thing to avoid is misleading your customers by putting your model in a larger scene and posting that render. It could become confusing if you are selling a 3D plant model but your renders show a scene consisting of that 3D plant model as well as characters, vehicles and other such things. If you must post a larger scene like this be sure to be clear in your description what is included when the 3D model will be digitally downloaded.
Once your have gathered your digital products, created renders and are ready to sell online you must make a choice. You can either post your models on third party websites or create your own website with which to sell your products. Consider the pros and cons here. By selling your models on another website you are going to have to split the profits with that website. Generally you will make 30-50% of the price you set your work for when selling through websites. If you create your own site then you are free to keep all profits without sharing with anyone else.
The downside to creating your own online market place is that you will have to put time into SEO and driving traffic to the site which is a job in of itself. If you have the time and determination this could be very wise however as with most you may not have the time. In this case it is smart to use sites which are already established and have targeted traffic coming into them.
Selling your 3D models and other digital art assets online is a great way to bring in some extra cash. With a little preparation designers can take elements of their past projects and continue to profit off of them for years to come!
