Background
Polydactyl is a two man team working part time on making 3D assets. Both of us have backgrounds in science, without any training in 3D model-making. We enjoy making simple and stylized models, yet we dream of making sophisticated and highly detailed ones.
Making models started out 3 years ago as a hobby, and the passion quickly turned into a tiny business. Though during the early days we only managed to make a few models and barely $5 per month, we were slowly but surely making progress. With so little experience, every step since has been a continuous learning process for us.
One of our earliest assets:
What We Create
Being a part of the Long Live the Animals Association or LLAMA (of course we made it up), we decided to turn these wonderful creations, i.e., the animals, into digital models. We thought that focusing on a certain segment of the market would work best for such a small team. Also, focusing on a theme means that our customers know what to expect from us every time. So here we are, crafting new animals every now and then.
Forest animals from our Wild Series assets:
Our assets are made specifically for, though not limited to, video games. We’ve seen customers using them for education, simulation, animation video, and, of course, games. One example is this comical game where you fly around the city as a crow, looking for victims to spoil their day. Another customer even bought our Red Panda just to have it idling on top their VRChat character.
Being on this venture as part-timers, we often find difficulty in following a consistent development schedule – on some weekends we may have the free time to create new assets while the others, not so. Also, our models usually require us to spend hours and hours to complete. Considering these problems, we decided to come up with an asset style which isn’t too complicated and would take much less time to finish. We even reduced the animation to only a couple keyframes! But the result is something we can say is fun and entertaining.
Our new Quirky Series asset style:
Pricing
Putting a price tag onto our assets is sometimes a difficult call since we don’t want to overprice, nor kill the market by underselling our assets. One quick way of rationalizing our prices is by asking ourselves, “With this much time and effort to complete this asset, is this price (e.g. $5) reasonable?”. This question alone, without any further analysis, often takes us to a comfortable idea for the price range.
We also have this free berry asset with a bit of a game idea in it:
Our Setup
Setting up on Sketchfab is a simple task done quickly. We set the renderer to classic and lit as the first step. Then, we set all lights to hemisphere and tweak their colors a little. As for post processing, we try to minimize the use of it as we want to have our assets looking as close as possible to the original texture.
Why Sketchfab?
Sketchfab has been a fabulous platform for us to serve our assets to the world. The built-in 3D viewer is an exact tool essential to people like us. We love the fact that the process of uploading, presenting, and selling our asset is one that is straightforward and, most importantly, simple. We definitely think that Sketchfab’s UI & UX team knows their stuff very well (high five!).
Going Forward
Our dream is to have a whole library of animals for others to enjoy looking at and working with. This dream might take years to be realized, but we’re optimistic about this quest. Most importantly, we love what we do and we’ll travel through this whole journey – to more cute animals for the internet!
Thank you for reading.
About the author
Omabu
3D Artists @ Polydactyl
