Making a Living as a 3D Character Artist

I've made over a million dollars creating 3D characters for the last 10 years the question is whether or not you can still do that today I think you can and in this video I'm going to show you how I make money doing 3D art and how maybe you can too okay first up I just want to say this is not a great way to make money okay just off the top doing 3D art is not a like a get-rich quick scheme and it's not like you know know having a Drop Shipping business or mining crypto

or something it's not like a cool electronic clever way to make money all right so if that's what you're into you know just this isn't for you really this is just about For the Love of the Game okay if you are like me and you're passionate about 3D art you're just really interested or fascinated you have fun doing it then the actual dream is to just find ways to be paid to do that so that we don't have to get a real job J and we can keep 3D modeling you know that's the dream if

someone pays you to do what you want to do you got it another kind of disclaimer is that I'm not rich all right I I don't have like a bunch of money I don't have a million dollars in the bank account but I do have a a wife and two kids and a house in Los Angeles and I can support everything we have a nice life you know by doing 3D characters for games you know in my book that is successful by my definition I'm really happy with how things ended up and I get to

you know fund uh the life that I live doing 3D character modeling so if you're into 3D modeling and you're trying to think of ways to make money hopefully some of this info can help you it takes years to get good enough to even be in the you know conversation of whether or not someone's going to pay you so uh this is definitely not a beginner kind of thing but maybe if you're into it and you think hey is there a future potentially hopefully this can kind of help answer that but you know the future

is unpredictable it always is okay last disclaimer here I'm going to show some numbers I'm going to show some of my numbers and some other things that are like sensitive or you know cuz I'm also I'm a working character artist in game so I'm not going to show things that would make people feel uncomfortable but the things I can show I will I'll show you enough to get you a glimpse of you know uh the kind of money that I'm making and I live in Los Angeles in the US for contact so this is all

going to be in in USD this is not a braggy sort of thing not like trying to show off just trying to share things in the spirit of transparency you know I think we should all know uh what people make because then it helps us make decisions and so hopefully this can help at least give you some ideas or some context in what kinds of money maybe on average or maybe a little bit above average you can make doing this sort of thing all right so I just want to share my personal experience with how

I make money doing 3D art so that hopefully you can either get an idea or inspiration or find ways that you can too okay now with that out of the way we're going to jump in I'm going to give you five main ways that I've made money over the years doing 3D art I'll talk about it a little bit give you some more info and then I'll kind of give you like an upsides and a downsides to these different things based on what I learned to hopefully give you some more context all right jumping in

number one the number one way to make money doing 3D art is landing a studio job that's really all you need to know that's the biggest thing you could Land If you're trying to make a living doing this uh so I want want to jump over here and show you this is an actual job posting from my studio that I work at for a lead character artist which is the role that I currently am and if we scroll down here you'll see that they have the salary here's the salary range listed again in the spirit

of transparency the government agrees with me they made by law at least in California here you have to show you know what the salary range is which is great cuz it used to be in the dark and people would negotiate and they would just kind of bluff and everything so this is much better so I can show you this salary range now if we just look at the low end here which is $135,000 a year you know I've been doing this for 15 years if you made that kind of money for like eight or N9

years in a row boom that's a million dollar that's the title of this video right there you know again it's not like a hey I've got a million dollars and I'm rich but can you have a comfortable living and support a family and everything yes I did all my friends in the industry did and are doing that you know people have more kids than me so definitely it's something that's possible right now and in the future I see that continuing AI is kind of a variable what does it mean and nobody really knows uh and

that's going to grow and become more and more incorporated into what we do I'm sure but for the foreseeable future for you know 5 to 10 years I would say there's going to be Specialists needed it's already kind of a limited job market compared to how many people you know have the interest but the people that get to the level that a studio would be willing to pay them not only this but like the burn rate it would cost to have someone in a studio and you're paying the electricity bill you're paying for all the

software licenses you're paying for the computers you're paying for their insurance you know we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for one person so it's just kind of the top tier uh of the skill you know of the talent pool out there that would land the sort of job now I'll just talk a little bit about those upsides and downsides kind of the pros and cons kind of goes without saying right but the main Pros here is with a salary job you have a good paycheck and it's consistent you can be a little

bit predictable right these projects go for multiple years and you know where you're going you know what you're doing you clock in you clock out and typically they'll come with benefits like insurance or 401K so it's the most you know jobby job of all these things but this sort of thing you're it it's as predictable as you you can be as a professional artist is uh being a studio artist all right so those are all the pros uh downside one of the downsides is location now with work from home since Co pandemic stuff went much

better I work from home now even though the studio is like 30 40 miles away so yeah you can be remote now but still you have to be like in country or in a country that the company has a business you know has like business relations and a process for because bunch of legal things and tax things and stuff so just because yeah Studios do remote it's not like hey I can be in Sri Lanka or something and work in New York there's red tape and it changes all the time uh for the different you

know countries and administrations and stuff so you do have to be within the location zone right and some studios require you to go into the studio a couple days uh out of the week or every day so every studio is different but there is a location variable there another sort of downside you might say or like one of the challenges to be able to land something like this is the experience needed like I said it's kind of the cream of the crop that would be considered for these jobs because there aren't that many openings and

there's a lot of people that want them and again you're as a company you're paying a lot of money and you want you know your bet to work out this is like a multi-year thing you're like I want to bring someone in in house to help us finish this big project right now at my studio there's going to be four or five character artists at the studio and so you know I'm sure hundreds would want those jobs so essentially it's like a high bar to clear and another downside I would say is it it can

become a sort of job right and I don't mean to say like oh wo is me it's not it's awesome way better than a real job right but something people that don't really consider or they don't think about at least I didn't until I got into the studio jobs is the majority of the people that are working in a studio on a project on a game since I'm a game artist they aren't usually the people that would buy that game you know I think at least growing up right I was like I want to work

on the games that I want to play obviously right that's kind of the specific dream but as things go if if someone's going to give you an awesome role on a really cool project making art you want to make every day you're going to jump at the chance that doesn't mean that it's you know perfectly aligned with what you're doing so as a part of what you're doing you're going to be asked to do things that you would normally do and as an artist that feels a little bit different right someone says do this go

left instead of right and you're like oh what and you're making a game that maybe you wouldn't buy or you know so you're not it doesn't align with you perfect and so you have to be professional about it you have to think okay if this is for this kind of person what could be cool and you know it's a little bit more professional more of a job than someone might think uh and it's a long-term thing so having relationships with people at the studio and communicating and you know taking being part in meetings and everything

you know there's it's kind of an office job you know maybe it's not a downside but it's a reality of the situation to be factored in second way to make money that we should be talking about is freelancing sort of the opposite of an in-house Studio artist is freelance artists freelance you take contracts you know you do odd jobs you do weird things like that reaching out to people or or being reached out to and you're taking these short to longterm uh kind of very contracts to do projects you come on you know you're like

a Hired Gun you come on B bam here's my cool 3D model boom and you're off to another thing so here's a contract that I did was to make galado for um a title sequence and uh you know ended up getting used in different ways but whatever you know they paid me to make uh a 3D galado and I was like that sounds like a cool thing let's do that so this examp I don't do contracts that often but there's an examp example of one someone hit me up and we did that so some people

can make a living doing this by jumping from contract to contract and kind of juggling it you know some people favor taking freelance jobs because it affords them a different kind of lifestyle that you wouldn't have doing the studio job so like some upsides with the freelancing is that location doesn't matter now you know you can be anywhere uh they don't have the same tax red tape and and legality and stuff uh you know you're doing contracts I have contractors working for me from all over the world and the same goes with being a 3D

artist so you can you know take a contract for a couple weeks or a couple months and kind of be a digital Nomad and go around the world so people do that while you're in your 20s or something right just traveling the world going from contract to contract and living in hostiles and stuff you know you can do that sort of things the location doesn't matter another kind of upside to freelance compared to studio jobs is we don't have that high of a bar there are contracts that have a high bar right um but but

the skill range is much wider there's going to be contracts at every level and they're going to pay accordingly but you know if you're not that experienced if you don't have shipped titles under your belt or you haven't worked on big projects or something like that if you have a portfolio that is good enough to Peak someone's interest that also is kind of has in a position to take a little bit of a risk then you can find contracts at the lower levels which I did to start too I I took contracts to make 3D

characters for like slot machine games when you win they come out and they're like hey you know whatever uh a digital blackjack dealer you know you take weird jobs really great artists aren't going to reply to their job postings and you know the really hot studios are going to get back to you so you can find these like you know Mutual beneficial contracts at lower levels and it goes all the way from there to like really high paying awesome contracts with big companies another upside with freelancing is the variety you know you're working on different

kinds of things you're working on uh commercials you're working on title sequences movies games toys you know different styles and different subject matter and that's fun that that could be cool right if you're into that it also is a great way to level up really fast again oppos to the studio jobs where you're doing the same thing for 3 or four years you know relatively the same thing freelancing is all over the place that brings us to sort of the downsides of freelancing which is it's all over the place so it's a little bit more

stressful especially if you start to have like family and dependencies and stuff you know that could be kind of nerve-wracking unless you have a real solid system down and you have relationships with vendor and stuff that you've built over time you don't really know you can't plan multiple years in the future uh you know you got to get your next contracts lined up so there's some like you're kind of always Under the Gun there's always a stress there so it's definitely a downside with freelancing the other thing is it's kind of a bummer for a

lot of artists like for me to have to be more in charge and more on top of the business side of things cuz now you are in charge of reaching out and having relationships with people making sure the contracts are okay making sure you get paid following up making sure your taxes are paid making sure you have insurance you know you got to do it all there's not you know you don't just show up at like at a studio so you got to you got to be kind of business person too so where do you

get these kind of jobs um you know you'd have to do a lot of cold calling if you're have the lower levels there are job boards like you can see here on uh art station there's a bunch of job stuff so you can see freelance and stuff so you know there's just a lot of job postings on boards like this public boards like on RC or U maybe even LinkedIn upwork uh I've I've hired contractors on upwork to help me with projects so is that sort of thing and then if you put things out on

social media you can get like just cold dm' by random stuff although be wary of that but uh that gadoo project I got hit up on Instagram that's how I got that I've also done like a a model for like a skin care ad and that was through uh Instagram it's it can come from all over the place but if it is your main source of Revenue then you got to be hustling kind of reaching out uh a lot that's going to be part of your job all right third way that I make money doing

3D art and stuff is digital products that's something that has a big range too some people that can be their main source of income their main like way of living I just have a couple digital products you can probably even see them below this video I have them on some of the marketplaces and it's stuff that I made as a part of what I do and then I sell it uh to people that also do the same kind of art that I do so I've got a skin detailing thing and and a base mesh pack

now I just want to speak a little bit on what I think is really useful and different about art station so my digital products are on a couple different things on Art station if you see look here's an ad for my product right here cuz I'm not logged in I'm not logged in so it doesn't know that I'm me right so if someone just sees my artwork and you can see like you know you know here 22,000 people saw this page you know they would see this ad uh and if they if you click it

it clicks through and it takes them to the product so that's what's awesome about art station in particular okay we'll talk about the other marketplaces you can see what is a trending and trending means what people are clicking on Art station so we got a lot of horny people over here but that's okay but trending is actually really useful for products so like say I'm over here at the shop but say like I just go to um art station to check out the artwork okay so I'm just coming over here to check my trend artwork

you know people do this every day tens of thousands of people do this every day scrolling down oh look what we have here trending stuff on the marketplace so you know sometimes you're lucky enough to have your product out there if enough people are clicking on it boom and now everyone that went to Art station that day they see it so the fact that they surface it to people on the posts that's related to those posts and also if you're trending you're actually just showing up on the page when people are looking at art that

leads to a lot more sales all right so I'll show you some of my sales here all right so in art station uh this year and I guess we're about halfway through the year you can see 11,000 uh you know $200 there and these products are old so I did make more before this is just you know half the year so far and this is passive income that's the biggest Pro from this right is if you make digital products it's kind of set it and forget it unless it takes a lot of Maintenance but most

of the time right you can just put them on these digital marketplaces and as long as they're actually valuable that's the thing when you make a digital product it has to actually be valuable to somebody uh and mine's really Niche right like zbrush you're sculpting skin details in zbrush that's very Niche and then base meshes for your characters that's a little bit more Broad and that's it I use them in all my projects people can use them in their projects uh and that's it and so thankfully people enjoy them and it's working out and so

I made these years ago and I still get paid for them and that's great and so someone could definitely make this sort of a side business business and try to make more and more products I want to mention to a couple other marketplaces this is Art station I think for art products you know similar to mine things that are in the entertainment art realm brushes 3D assets things that you people can use in their projects I think art station is great for that you know jumping over to gumroad here's my gumroad you can see like

of all time which is I don't know 10 years made about 5,000 still not going to complain pretty awesome right I just have like a couple products on there but if you're going to use something like gumroad it's on you to like Market it and really put it out there which is what art station is doing for me which is great another Marketplace I want to shout out is the Unreal Engine Marketplace so just something to think about if you're a 3D artist that is trying to have like a side hustle turn it into something

where you can make a living I think the Unreal Engine Marketplace um isn't getting its like respect yet especially for people in the 3D modeling Community uh at least not everybody but you you know you can see there's some medieval ruins and stuff people make characters here's the thing about the Unreal Engine Marketplace and everything you got to think it's a lot more broad than people think people are using it to make games at the high level but they're also using it to make indie games and also proof of Concepts some studios just buy stuff

to get pitches going and then outside of the game industry you have films like you know Mad Max Fury Road used it for previs uh Batman used it for actual on screen stuff you know the Star Wars shows everything that uses a volume a ton of movies are using it for their previs and their storyboards now and that stuff they just buy a bunch of assets so if you put assets on the Unreal Engine Marketplace that are actually you know useful if they actually work in the engine uh you know you can put the rig

and the animations on there and everything then you can find kind of gaps uh you can think about weird nichy things and there's going to be someone that might you know use it down the line again passive income so it's another Marketplace I just wanted to shout out uh for now into the future cuz Unreal Engine just keeps growing and growing all right so that's selling digital products uh on marketplaces and stuff again a good thing hard to make a full-on living out of it the downside I would say is that it takes consistency to

maintain you know uh my like my products will dip right slowly over time and you'd have to put put out more products that are equally or more valuable to you know sustain an income and grow it so it is hard as a main way of living um but it's a great side Hustle but there's levels to this okay if we go over here to cubebrush.com here's a Marketplace that Mark brunette made who was a character artist for games and he said sell products I'll sell a Marketplace so he has a Marketplace that has as on

it that you and I could sell on and then his business obviously would would take a little percentage so that's uh that's next level stuff but has an example of someone who is who was a 3D character artist was making a living and grew it in lots of different ways and this is one of them making his own you know full-on website with lots of things and tutorials so another Marketplace made by other character artists and yeah again game assets brushes and everything so there you go even more levels to this uh but yeah both

have um similar if not the same kinds of assets uh and just more places to buy and sell these kind of things so you can see we just talked about five different online marketplaces so you know putting out digital products that are useful for people totally worth it like you see some of these you know dragon scales we have 40 reviews you know how many people are going to leave a review like 10% I mean a lot of people are engaging and interacting and getting these things and if you're someone who sells digital products it

just makes sense for you to put it on as many marketplaces as possible right that's like having your product in a lot of different stores makes sense all right fourth way to make money doing the 3D art thing is social media I'm just going to say that is as a bucket there's a couple different ways you can make money in social media um mainly I would say the way is by sponsored posts or sponsored you know in Integrations I tried that in in the YouTube earlier YouTube days I integrated some skillshare ads those are really

common uh and there's other uh companies that I'm sure you've seen so it's a way to get paid a little bit uh for something that you were kind of planning on doing already and then you can get kind of um products things like that so that's one way to make money although there's not a lot of money in some of the brands unless you really do a nice collaboration uh and you get to the uh higher levels but um it is more than AdSense this is how much money I made on my YouTube channel for

the last 30 days from ads so 140 bucks yeah so all time from uh 2006 to 2024 from ads is $188,000 pretty good again I would consider this just passive income like not the main thing you know I was going to make videos anyways and then with YouTube you just turn ads on so I will say um ad Revenue not the best I just had a couple videos pop off and that's going to account for like 90% of that ad stuff I'm sure so you know you have to get lots and lots of views to

make money with ads but there's also with social media there's memberships and patronage and stuff like that right so I have a YouTube membership you can see in the last 30 days I made $11,000 so that's pretty good uh and we have have a a cool little member Community there we also have a member Community uh on patreon and so that's the same content is going on both so I'm making these videos that are you know if I do a project I'll put like unedited raw realtime footage on there we'll do monthly q&as while you

know people can ask any question they want they can submit their work and I'll do like paintovers and reviews and things like that so you know it's just a little bit more than the Casual YouTube audience but it's a way for them to pay a little bit for a little bit more and a way for me to monetize and and make that work you know in my life too where now we can have like a little kind of educational Community or whatever you want to call it where it's reciprocal and that's an awesome thing that

social media provides now it's easy for both parties to like make and sell and and you can have really small niches like this like the stuff we're talking about is so obscure to people that don't know anything about this stuff I'm sure we get to just nerd out and uh I love that about the memberships is I just know they're Geeks like me and we can just talk shop all day and they like it and I like it so it's great so definitely the upsides of social media is it's passive it's usually connected to stuff

you'd be kind of already doing downsides are you got to be consistent right you got to keep putting stuff out there I'm not the greatest at that but if you're going to make a living doing that you got to be consistent for sure cuz that's now your main source of income and if you don't get you know if you're not careful you can just turn into like content brain where like now all of a sudden it's like what would get views and what would all you know all that stuff and that's something that I think

all creators like struggle with once you start you know getting monetized for views and engagement it starts to shift it starts to become a job just like anything else right but uh I just kind of do what I want to do and put it up there so uh you I don't I don't run that risk yet but I definitely try and think of stuff that I like and that people would like you know not just doing it in a void but yeah for the people that make get their sole source of income uh it turn

it can turn into a real Hustle real grind right okay so now the fifth way to make money doing 3D art and stuff is teaching it that I feel like is the final boss teaching can pay well under the right circumstances but it requires a lot of experience and knowledge and expertise right that this is not something that people are going to do or at least do that successfully in the first couple years of getting into this sort of hobby you know I'm I'm 15 years plus into it and I've been teaching for years and

I've been you know doing things on YouTube and I've taught in real life classes I've taught another online class my parents were teachers so it's not a casual thing you just dip into um and it's I also I would say it's another skill set and I think some artists I know some artists just aren't into that you know communicating with others um trying to you know formulate uh these kind of abstracts into digestible things yada yada teach you know teaching is different than arting okay so it's not for everybody and there's obviously a big barrier

to entry is that you kind of need to be an expert before you turn around and teach and then it's a lot of effort to teach and everything but that being said I think it's great uh the pros are obviously that it can be uh you know monetarily good for you but also it can be very fulfilling it's awesome to teach uh students and help them in their own Journeys and projects and see them grow and be proud of their work and make awesome stuff and everything like that so it's something that I don't get

with my own art and it's something that you know rounds out what I do it's another angle another source of Joy that's related to this stuff so uh my main thing that I teach now is character class you can see character class.com and yeah so you know you can go there to learn more if you want about that class this is the main thing I teach this is my uh this is my Ancient Aliens guy pose you know hey dude it pyramids man so yeah you can just read about it whatever all the all the

things but yeah this class is about making realtime characters for games and portfolios and stuff and trying to make you know Banger stuff that people like and want to click on and hopefully can add the portfolio y yada and so we've already run that once and we're going to run it again and it's been good so I'll I will show you a little bit of numbers related to this too I won't get into all of it but enough for you to see so I highlighted uh February 19th to February 21st so in 3 days you

can see I made uh $399,000 when I opened enrollment for the class the first time and this is just the first three days uh but you can get a peek in here I thought it was interesting you see on one day uh I gross almost $22,000 so that's obviously business-wise or MoneyWise the most I've ever made in one day by far obviously uh and also you know we're getting to a point just in these 3 days where uh my first five years as a studio artist I made $50,000 a year and you know now we're

getting to a point where in a in a few days we're almost matching that so pretty cool just in terms of uh the journey and the career again not something that everybody can do but I think it's interesting for the people that you know are thinking about a long road map are interested in teaching that if you can teach someone something that is of value to them and you can do it in a way that helps them then they'd be happy to pay you for it you'd be happy to teach you them and you can

become successful doing that and that can be the main source of uh income for sure so another couple examples this made me think of this Raph gretti has uh his own workshop class and he's using gumroad here you can see I've purchased some of his classes so these are like workshops that he recorded then he sells them later and they're very affordable now you can get in here and like learn some stuff so some of it like you know years old you know maybe it's not the most modern uh techniques now or whatever but still

obviously useful still tons of useful info in there and it's just awesome that artists of High Caliber that are at jobs that people want are sharing information that's what I hope everybody would do and so finding those people and and getting their information is something obviously people like me and probably you are interested in also makes me think of yan sculpt who makes uh really cool YouTube videos also he does blender stuff so if you're into blender modeling sculpting uh texturing and all that rendering you know he's got his his courses here along with the

videos he posts online so these are affordable online classes you can just buy right now on demand that's awesome also you have mentorships I just jumped I'm just going to show you me the mentor Coalition are essentially it's a website that people are coming together uh like a group of mentors that have specialties and so this one is a is a character artist so just showing mentorships is another thing that uh is great for people that have skills where you know you're not necessarily doing a class it's more of like a meeting and a review

and a you know uh you know mentoring somebody uh and then obviously if you're into learning stuff then you could also look at this stuff you know you might be a patron you might be a mentee of someone like this uh but seeking out people in the industry like I know glauco longi had a mentorship going on for a little bit you know I've done a mentorship for a small period of time so you might be able to find professionals that are aligned with your career goals or your art aesthetic and interest and they are

actually sharing their info that's the best sort of thing because you can get you know that one-on-one time you can ask them a question you can show them work like how did you do this how do you do this and Bam you get the answer that could be very successful for both parties so that's just five ways that I made money I'm sure there's way more than that and there's more all the time new ways of monetizing like all this stuff wasn't always around this is just looking back and looking at the current snapshot right

now of kind of revenue streams but there's more all the time so I think it's important to be creative and open to like what's going on and how can we use some of the different tools and platforms and marketplaces and all this stuff that's changing all the time to enable us to monetize the things that we love doing uh all the time and if you're someone that just from a skill set wise you're not at a level where you can do this stuff for money or people aren't interested in paying you or whatever that's fine

you know that again you shouldn't be doing any of this for the money if you interested and you enjoy doing 3D art at all just keep doing it and if you continue to do it you don't stop and you grow you'll get better and better and then you will get to a point at some point that people will want to pay you for your expertise that now you have now you have something of value to people and that's what the this is all about is like trading value so really first and foremost it's just if

you like doing 3D modeling just do it um do it for do it for the joy of it and you know later on down the line if you get to the point where hey I've been doing this for years and I still enjoy doing it and now I'm getting a little bit better okay we can get a little bit more serious made a little more structured in how we learn and and all that stuff and doing things to help ourselves grow to become more marketable and then trade it for things like this and uh just

be creative in ways to make money so that hopefully you can just do this more and more more if this is what you want to be doing with your time all right so hopefully there's some nugget in there that would help you with what you're doing or in your in the future uh so that you can keep doing the things that you love to do and get paid doing it all right that's it for this one peace out