About me
I’m Markus Schüler, the man behind MSGDI. I’m from Germany and 41 years old. I started 3D modeling in 2012 after a job loss. I had to reorient myself and started modeling, texturing, and animating with Blender. The same year I started selling models.
My very first model was some sort of power armor, completely rigged and animated. I followed a Blender lowpoly character creation course and adapted it to a hard surface armor model. Shortly after that I tried sculpting some regular characters. You can see them in the pic above. I use the things I learned about rigging, skinning and animating still today, e.g., for creating my mechs:
Artistic focus
Although my sculpting attempts were decent, I quickly realized that sculpting/organic modeling is just not my cup of tea. I always had a sweet spot for sci-fi, so I tried modeling some spaceships. Homeworld is one of my favourite games (in fact, all the games of the Homeworld series are). I would say that Homeworld was and to this day is my main source of artistic inspiration.
I continued doing spaceships and space-related models like stations, jumpgates, asteroids, etc. because they’re a lot of fun, honestly. Over the years I think I have made ca. 300 space models so far (don’t know the exact number).
My models are all game-ready low-poly assets. Of course, they can be used for other things too, like rendering a book cover or in video production. All weapons are separate meshes and can be moved around on the ship hull.
Recently, I started adding more modular parts to the ship hulls so that the whole look of the spaceship can be changed, e.g., more engines, different bridges, etc.
Other areas of interest
Aside from space-related models, I enjoy doing other sci-fi hard surface stuff like tanks, mechs, turrets, jet fighters, or firearms. Btw, you can find all of them on Sketchfab. 🙂
Balancing artistic and paid work
There is nothing to balance because I almost do no paid work. All my commercial work is a product of my own imagination. I work without guidelines or input from someone else. The models do then go on sale on various 3D marketplaces. This means my artistic work IS my paid work.
Deciding what to create
Obviously, I want the models that I create to sell. After all, I have to pay bills, too. That said, I simply think about what assets are useful for the development of a game in a specific genre. For example, for a first-person shooter you need guns, rifles, rocket launchers—weapons in general. And because FPS games don’t really go out of style, weapons are good assets to make.
On the other hand, there are already tons of weapons available to buy. But they are mostly real-world weapons, like AKs, M16s or G36. So my approach is to make near-future sci-fi weapons because there are not so many out there.
Another idea is to focus on auxiliary assets. For an FPS game, that would be everything that’s usually needed besides weapons, for example, med kits or health packs, ammunition, consoles to activate stuff, etc.
Where models have been used
Unfortunately, I’m usually not informed about what games or projects use my models. Off the top of my head, I can list these three:
Pricing
I would say that my pricing is fair considering the amount of work that goes into creating the models. In general, I consider my prices as “indie dev friendly”.
Promotion
I should do more promotional work—definitely. 🙂 I post on Facebook, Twitter, DeviantArt, and ArtStation about new releases.
Setup on Sketchfab
On Sketchfab I aim for consistency regarding the presentation. That means I use the same background, the same lighting conditions, etc. I prefer a dark background so that the model itself stands out.
New assets in the future
I will continue making new spaceships as I have a whole list of ideas lined out. Apart from that, I think that more FPS assets are never a bad idea. And finally, I’m thinking about going back all those years to my first models and working on some animated characters again. This is my rough outline for the next year or so.
Contact Info & Links
The best and fastest way to contact me is by email.
Sketchfab (go to the collections section – there you find all models neatly organized) / Facebook / Twitter / DeviantArt / ArtStation / YouTube / Patreon
About the author
Markus Schüler
I create hard surface sci-fi models.
