*Disclaimer* - I'm focusing on my personal take on how much effort and time I would use to make body textures to an acceptable level.

I've recently been browsing around the art market, as most of us do, and come to the conclusion that making a full set is a guaranteed waste of time.

Lets say we make a pretty decent head (top 5% of artist pool) and we can sell it for 50k, and if you try hard enough you can sell a "famous" head for 100k pretty much max.

Now we move to sets. sets take an insane amount of time to even map 100% correctly. not counting trying to keep the quality up to the 50k head. So lets play with some numbers and say it takes 20k per independent texture.

Now lets count body parts.

1 head (keystone)
2 feet (hard to map)
2 leg
2 thigh
6 torso (hardest to map perfectly)
2 biceps
2 triceps
2 hands (hard to map)

18 body parts/ 12 if its symmetrical.
18 x 20 = 360 + 50 (head) = 410
or
12 x 20 = 240 + 50 = 290

Now obviously we can say some textures are "simpler" and lower the price a bit, But still.. you lower 290 by 1/3 and you are still around 200k... even 150k is a 25k head texture and and symmetrical 10k body textures.


Now lets add 20 more joint textures that are 500x harder to map seamlessly to the body texture. And now you are up to 39 (asymmetric) or 25 (symmetric). Lets also say we aren't buying anything for over 300k because that's how the art market is.

that's like 12k a texture for a symmetric set (12k head)
or like 7.5k a texture for asymmetric.

So now if you go on the market and look what 7.5-12-20k head/body textures look like how can an artist justify making anything besides head textures?

Just my thoughts. Also the tc amounts may be a little off for head textures, but I'm sure I can find examples of things that are pretty close to my estimations. And I may be biased towards what I think is actually good artwork.


The question being: why would anyone make a set besides making one for themselves.

it's not costing you tc to draw

Or is it? If we pretend that time = tc. Then in the time i make 1 set (13 textures) i could have made 4 heads (4 textures). Now my heads can easy make around 150k where my symmetrical set cannot. And it gets worse with asymmetrical and joints.

then limit yourself on your art work and etc,

I'm saying there is actually no point to make a set, except because you want to.

I guess the other question is do other artists feel the same?


I texture sometimes when I'm bored and don't do requests so it is just a hobby. I could care less about the tc, because i can just go to work for an hour and get more "money." However I'm just comparing sets and heads to tc because thats how this community operates.

If you want to be a big pro TC min/maxer then yeah, by your logic it might be better to just make heads. But you said it yourself - most (quality) texturers do it primarily as a hobby*, and it's sometimes more entertaining/interesting to make a full set with a unified theme than just cranking out head texture after head texture. I know I preferred the process of designing and creating an entire set, whether or not I was getting more TC for my time.

*At least, that was the case for me and the ones I interacted with.

12 if mirrored, 200k set, which is 16 666TC for each piece of texture.
body textures are generally easier to make because you don't need to put an equal amount of work into them compared to head textures, as long as you have an awesome head on the set and some nice hands you are golden. Lets say you spend 2 hours making a beautiful head for 50k, you can probably make 3 body textures in the same amount of time. And 16 666 x 3 = 50k. Chest/breast/abs are in some cases just the same texture which adds even less work.

Also you have to take in to concideration that you have to sell all the head textures invidividually on the market which is a hassle, rather than selling just a set.

Making a jointed texture set is pretty silly, not many people have the joint textures and even if they do having joints won't really move the price on the set up by that much. However if you do mudbox texturing you might as well include them because they don't really add that much extra work.

ofc there are many factors involved here, but I think making sets and heads is about equally profitable.

There is also a request thread. There have been multiple times were players have requested sets for large amounts that you'd otherwise not get from just making textures and selling them.


From my experiences, sets are a bit easier to sell. Can usually sell a set in a day while it'll take a couple days for me to sell a head.

the main thing is that you cant compare sets to heads the real thing that is happening is
1 there are less legendary sets than heads.
currently the art market is starved. good art goes for whatever someone is willing to pay for it for instance i sold this head http://imgur.com/mMHkZgM for 75k is this a legendary head to you?
a heads price point is almost random and since there are a lot less active artists people buy them for more than they should
for instance lets say the heads that turtle is currently selling
http://forum.toribash.com/showthread.php?t=558500
1.these heads haven't been passed around to much
2.were probably bought at a loss for real cash
3.these heads were made by good artists who don't make heads anymore
now look at the sets currently being sold on the market are there any sets that come close to being like turtles heads?
lets take 2 set selling threads (newly made sets)
http://forum.toribash.com/showthread.php?t=552175
http://forum.toribash.com/showthread.php?t=553915
not as known artist yet both sets sold for 300k-200k
Do you think if these artists made heads they would sell for 50k and they are some of the only artists that still make art so surely they are in the top 5%
you cant compare those heads to the sets it wouldn't make sense not all the heads you make will sell for 50k and not all the sets will sell for 500k there is also the jointed not jointed variable as well

2. i've seen set requests that go for 1 million tc that hanz0 made and calamity made a requested set for over 600k, you don't have to make a set for what seems to you as a "loss". There have really not been a lot of new sets that have come out recently. A lot of art is just passed around which in a sets case makes it worth less even if it is a "good set". Honestly the art market is shit right now because of a lack of artists and request threads are also shitty since the artist isn't sure if they will get the tc for the texture and threads like 240k for one head texture don't turn out to be that way in the end since most of the time the work artists do isn't worth 240k it shows you how starved the art market is that people have to offer 240k to get people like you to make a head texture for them.
If you want to make money off of a set make a thread taking requests 500k and up and see how many people come running

just look at furryprints selling a '500k' head art from 13chillz nobody else has owned it before and it's just a simple looking head to me and isn't really that much worth it