3d model stock selling business.

[t0ol]

Hey.
Lately I`ve been seriously considering starting selling models on some stock sites.
So, I`d like to ask you SI community guys to share your experience with

1) Buying, what types of models do you usually buy, what are you looking for in terms of quality, what do you mostly pay attention to, do you redo UVs, do you need textures, pretty presentation etc.
2) Selling, anything here really, your advice or personal experience would be be greatly appreciated. I find it close to impossible to get a realistic estimate of seller`s paychecks.. there`s simply no trustworthy statistics on 3d stock sites other than ratings.. which is strange, cause on big vector stocks all the actual downloads info is accessible. Which brings me to
3) Selling rasters, not (and) models. Again, suggestions, info, advices, thoughts, all welcome.

In short I`d like to gather an impression on who the clients are in both 3d and 2d, what they want, and how one can capitalize on this in the most efficient manner.

[Lord Futzi Voldemort]

Well, at least I can tell you what to avoid when selling models. Let me put it this way:
There is a soccer ball model you can buy on turbosquid, made by some clever guy, who thought " Hm, not all programs can cope with material ids / clusters /face-sets for different materials, so i make a nice UV layout and move all of the white patches to the top half and the colored patches to the lower half. Then I make a simple bitmap with two plain colors for the two halves and voila, I got I nice colored soccer ball." And because he had the best intentions he made those bitmaps 4k. And three of them. So he ended up with a model about 300 KB or something and 48 Mb of texture.

Don't do this. ;)

No seriously, from my experience I don't think there is anything else to tell you than: Keep it clean. Don't triangulate or freeze SubD meshes. Name everything. Model to Origin (I once had a building that looked like it was placed on it's real world Gauss Kruger coordinates, somewhere in Mongolia). Y up! Freeze transforms. Test all formats! Don't use third party renderer shaders or at least add a native shaded version. No plugins in the stack.

And: People tend to buy the cheapest model that looks as clean as possible in the wire frame view.

[t0ol]

Lol ok

Regarding " Test all formats! " - any caveats when using xsi as a package of origin or whatever its called? I`m seeing most offers in max format, pressumabely cause the most demand comes from archviz guys i guess.. I dont think alot of people would need a scn file these days..

[Kzin]

quads with clean edgeflow and perfect uv's which correctly oriented.
if you have to do corrections to the models its a pain when these two things are broken.
logical seperated polyobjects inside of the model with correct naming is another one.