Johnnie Carling

I don't know why this is bothering me, I guess I'm just in a "mood" tonight, but here goes.

I got a really nice pair of sculptie over the knee boots about 3 or 4 weeks ago, loved them. but as the weeks pass I kept seeing them pop up at a ton of different stores priced anywhere from L$650 at some "big name" designers to L$100 at a crappy mall, and tonight I noticed them on xstreet in a fatpack of 15+ colors for L$99

I don't know, maybe I'm feeling ripped off for paying around L$250 to 300 for them. But I wonder what is in for it for the creator of the sculpts. The person sure has talent but I cant but help feel they just killed their market selling them as full perm merchant kits.

Who is gonna buy the full perm kits now that they really seem to of saturated the market? The only thing left is to sell a fatpack with 100 colors for L$50

OH just saw on Xstreet, someone selling 19 colors of this boot + 19 colors each of 2 more styles for $100, a fine example of someone who has not invested any real time on a product and just dumping them on the market.

Bla, maybe it's me and I'm a bitch.

Frans Charming

The merchant packs keep selling even if the market is saturated and they don't have to deal with fancy shop or end customer care.

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It is coming.

Ayumi

It quickly becomes apparent about which content "creators" (re-hashers?) are using full perm sculptie packs with baked textures as a "get rich quick" scam. Eventually they'll just undercut each other to death, and someone will get pissed and post them for 0L on SLX and we'll start seeing them in freebie boxes !

Someone should keep track of which packs are commonly circulating the market, so people know what they're getting into when they are looking at shoes/boots.

The alternative solution is for people to stop selling baked textures along with the sculptmaps. 99% of the people who are reselling the boots as-is, probably couldnt texture a sculpted prim to save their life.

Johnnie Carling

You know... maybe it is the textures that are gnawing on me. I have seen a ton of other things made with sculpt packs that I recognized and they never bothered me a bit.

Rosie Barthelmess

The fact of the matter is, there are content creators including myself who do not know how to make sculpties and therefore purchase the sculpties builder packs from wonderful creators like Logan and Aminom.

While I disagree with flooding the market with poorly textured crap made from prefab sculpties or offering them for L$99 when others who have worked hard on textures and other elements to add to the sculpts themselves charge reasonable amounts, I'm really sick and tired of the "you did not create that sculptie yourself so your creative content is therefore inherently worth less" argument.

There are lots of creators who take the sculptie shapes and put a lot of time into texturing them themselves, or doing some very creative things with them, adding to the sculpties or incorporating sculpties into other pieces.

However, yeah, when you see the same boots with the same textures being dumped around and there's obviously no extra work put into it, that sucks.

However, using prefab sculpt builders packs fullperm to create your own things in god faith isn't a sin and I'm about tired of it being treated like one.

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Owner/Designer, Sable Rose Jewelry
Owner/Manager, Shopatorium At Gallinas Shopping Center and The Patio Live Music Venue

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Gallinas/198/11/59

http://skatoolaki.com/sablerose -- Sable Rose Jewelry's blog.

Trout Rated: 7.0
"You are evidence that a woman who is comfortable in her own skin has a definite advantage over those who are not."

Siyu Suen

My general take on any sort of outsourcing is that no more than 30% of the item's value and appeal should be made by someone else. If you have a lovely dress that you designed and hand drew yourself, did all the skirt prims and textures, and then buy a sculpted sleeve so that you can finish the look, more power to you. If you make a pair of neko ears with textures that obviously look like they took you five minutes, with sloppy sculpts, and then hire a talented scripter to make them twitch or move with a HUD... then I'm going to look at you with derision. And hell no, I'm not going to give you money when I'd rather just pay your scripting friend.

If I'm going to be spending 400L on boots or shoes this month (despite having SL assets I really don't shop as much as you think I would/could) am I going to be giving it to a person who bought a prefab sculpt pack and spent twenty minutes adding laces and a ribbon or something? Or am I going to go shopping at a store where I know for sure that what I'm looking at came directly from that person's hours of sweat and frustration, talent and inspiration? I don't think there's really a choice there.

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"Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever" -Baron Munchausen

I'm attempting to bring about the end of the world to usher in a new era of mask wielding overlords. This is how!

Rosie Barthelmess

I agree with you, Siyu, but I think if someone uses a sculptie shape and puts the work into it to make it their own creatively, that's a difference.

I have the utmost respect for people who are able to create their own sculpties. It's really, really, REALLY REALLY hard. But there's a big difference between a swapmeet piece of crap that looks like a swapmeet piece of crap, and something someone's really tried to make their own creatively.

And the fact of the matter is, the most innovative and creative work being done with sculpties is probably by the people who are making and texturing their own and using them exclusively in their own pieces. But there's a market for prefab sculpties when they're used appropriately, I think.

Siyu Suen

That's part of the reason I'm more likely to think more fondly of sculpts like collars, sleeves, sculpted skirts or things like chains and gems (hi Aminom ), because they're very obviously components and would be pretty useless on their own. The pre-made boots... well, people can, and are, just packaging them up and selling them without doing almost any work themselves. And what's even more ridiculous is that some of these pre-made boots are coming pre-made from sites like Turbosquid and so they're not even made by the sculpty seller.

Carter-Madhu

You start off this paragraph saying that you don't like to see more than a certain percentage of the product outsourced, and then you finish off by saying if someone makes crap you won't like the product. I don't see what the one has to with the other. If the final product is good, it doesn't matter to me whether one person or 5 people contributed to its design, nor which of those 5 people's brand it gets sold under.


You only call it "outsourcing" because the SL system requires the conceit of a single creator - since SL requires you to buy products from a single creator. Maybe this artificially bolsters the perception that it's somehow cheating to divide labor among multiple creators. And the more complex the prim/sculptwork, the texturing, and the scripting, the more it becomes useful to have multiple contributors - whether as design partners, or as providers component parts like sculptmaps.

Very few RL products are produced by a single concern that doesn't obtain components designed and/or produced by other companies - much less by a single person who doesn't! So why should complex products in SL be any different?

To my eye there is absolutely nothing wrong with dividing labor in SL - let the good sculpters sculpt, the good texturers texture, the good scripters script, etc.

I don't know about you, but if I am going to spend money on boots, they are going to be boots I like. If they are crappily textured by someone who doesn't know how to texture a sculpty, I won't like them and I won't buy them. If the sculpted shape is so ubiquitous that they don't strike me as interesting, I also probably won't like them enough to buy them. But if the boots are well-textured and look nice, and if as far as I can tell the person selling them didn't violate any licenses to make them, I don't see any reason not to buy them.

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Pocket Gardens -- prefab landscaping ||| Madhu's Cafe world music coffeehouse

Jahar Aabye

I don't think that Siyu is talking about team projects, though. I think that her point was about original work rather than whether it was one person or 5, although I think that the post was worded pretty badly if that's the case.

A lot of stuff in SL is the result of collaborative efforts. Almost anything that is scripted, especially where it involves complex scripting, tends to be collaborative. While there are some people who have many talents, a lot of people tend to focus on one specific field, and generally if you're very good at scripting but only sorta good at building, it makes more sense from an economic perspective to concentrate on the scripting and find a good builder, and vice versa. Our products are certainly a collaborative effort, with four different builders, two scripters, two animators, and several sales staff.

But what Siyu is writing about is basically re-selling. Where someone purchases full-perms material and then re-sells that material with barely any value-added work. That's a very different situation, and people who spend hours and hours working on original content are going to get upset when they see people basically buying full-perms stuff, coloring it or slapping a texture on it, and then re-selling it as-is.

Collaborative efforts are very different. You won't see Grey or Ben or Mavericus or Falco's gun builds with anyone else's scripts in them except mine or Kayla's, for example. It's not something that they build and then also give out to anyone who asks. If you do happen to see their builds with someone else's scripts in them (such as the ubiquitous and uber-laggy Sirlor gun scripts), then please do let us know, as those are stolen/copybotted.

That's the difference that I think Siyu is talking about, where someone just takes a pre-made build, does very little extra to it, and then sells it as if it were their own.

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He pulled a Captain Ahab and Jaharpwn'ed her. - Trout

Carter-Madhu

I'm not talking exclusively about team projects either. I just don't perceive any difference between a team project on the one hand, and on the other hand purchasing components from what is basically an OEM manufacturer and then using them to create a finished product.

As a consumer (who, by the way, could not make a sculpt or texture one if her life depended upon it), I don't really care who made what. I only care if the final product is interesting, high-quality, nice-looking, functional, etc. If it's a ubiquitous sculpt with a piece of crap texture on it, I won't buy it. If it looks interesting, does what it's supposed to, is reasonably priced compared to other sellers of similar products etc, I might buy it.

Either way I don't care who made what part, nor do I care how many times those parts may have been licensed to other creators for other products.

Here's an example: the designer who built my cafe used a number of full-perm sculptmaps she acquired from other creators; she's not primarily a sculpt artist. She selected them well and textured them beautifully, some with textures she made, and others with textures she - gasp! - acquired with full-perms from other creators. And despite all of that "outsourcing," as Siyu termed it, my cafe is gorgeous (in my opinion) and doesn't look like any other place in SL.

The point is that good designers can do nice things with OEM materials from other creators; bad designers will make crappy things with the same materials. It's not the materials that are the problem.

Siyu Suen

I did word that badly, I didn't mean to imply that collaborative works were under that umbrella. Projects that have multiple minds working to one end tend to have some sort of standard distribution of profits. What I was meaning to address was what Jahar said, full perm goods that are paid for once, without any profit share or even necessarily credit. Things like The Abyss using a purchased full perm sculpty shoe in their Lolli avatars is very different from a place like Material Squirrel where the scripting and the textures go hand in hand as an integral part of the business as a whole.

My example with the neko ears was more to say that the total amount of work and effort was uneven between the two "halves" of the project, yet the person who had done the lesser of the two was receiving all of the credit and profit from it. And in cases like The Abyss I'm fine with prefab sculpts, since the boots aren't why you're buying that avatar, you're getting it for the entire package, and as long as he made the rest of the pieces, he's done the 70/30 thing.

I myself have gone to outside sources for scripts, and even sculpts (hi Miriel! ), but I put enough work and time into my part of the equation that 70% of the project is mine. Which is why I feel justified in taking the profits and credit in those cases.

Carter-Madhu

The person who made the sculpt got the profit from selling them full perm. It was her business decision to do that; if she comes back later and decides that she should be getting a greater cut of the profits, I guess she can decide to up the price of any sculpt-packs she sells in the future. But if she wanted to keep the credit and profits to herself, than she would have chosen a different business model than selling full-perm sculptmaps for other creators to incorporate into their own works under their own names.

Maybe the problem is in (as many problems seem to be) the SL permissions system. It's too bad that OEM creators have to release their items full-perm, rather than having the ability to offer enforceable limited licenses or a controlled number of uses or whatnot. And as for credit, as I noted above, this is just an artifact of the SL system that whittles things down to a single creator. But, you know, when I buy a TV in RL, I don't typically know who manufactured the transistors.

Imnotgoing Sideways

Just about everything I sell is either untextured or textured with what's freely available in full-perms texture packs and the LL Library folders. If texture work can be outsourced like that I can't see a problem with sculpts getting the same treatment. My only requirement is that the end result looks cool. (^_^)

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Louder than God's revolver and twice as shiny! (^_^)

Lil Hapmouche

At least I had a brilliant evening laughing at the guys who were frenetically mob-vending for a pack of said overknee boots with six of the default "you see them everywhere" textures, selling for not less than 1000Ls.

Guess they also had their share of fun when they yelled at me for being so incredibly rude to point them to the XStreet offer for 99L and way more textures.

*shrugs* Way to waste your money, not my problem.

Siyu Suen

I don't think comparing things to RL really is as good an example, or at least not with a TV/transistors. SL is much closer to an artist's colony, and we have the rare opportunity of being able to compensate the people who made things directly. You don't need distributors, outlet stores, malls or any other trappings of RL commerce when you can pop over to an artist's house, give them the cash, and have them give you the goods. I don't care about where the leather was bought from in my RL masks, or where the feathers were from, as long as the end product came from a talented artist.

So why don't I take the example out the other way? Let's say I have my choice to buy two different RL masks. On one hand, there's a mask made from molded leather, with feather trim, and the person who is selling the mask painted it, molded the leather themselves, and added the feathers, with maybe a velvet lining glued to the back. On the other, I have someone who bought a pre-made mask from a Venetian reseller, added some feathers, and is selling it pretty much as it was bought from the Venetian mask site. Both are the same price, but I'm going to support the real artist every time. And if I like the Venetian mask one so much, I can buy it myself and add feathers too, and have it exactly the way I want it.


Full perm sculpt sellers obviously feel they are getting compensated for their work, otherwise they wouldn't be in business. However, why aren't I giving the money directly to them instead of whoever randomly packages them up and brands them? My point is that given that choice, I will support the artist, rather than the middle man every chance I have, and SL gives me that chance more often than not.

Ciaran Laval

They're not interested in chasing your money that's why. They sell to a different market and make their profit accordingly. There's a lot of money to be made selling wholesale, no matter how they sell it. The sensible wholesalers look to value their product by selling it at high prices or in limited quantities or a combination of both.

Have you seen the price of the top classifieds in the fashion market? Some people just don't want to bother trying to compete with those sort of sums and look at a different business model. If at the end of the day the consumer is happy with the product that's all that really matters.

Jahar Aabye

The problem is that with SL's permission system, "wholesale" often turns into "BIAB." Eata posted another thread here about how this turns into a "race to the bottom" where people then try to re-sell the same full-perm objects at lower and lower rates, hoping to undercut everyone else. The reason being that since they put little effort into the actual creation of the object, there's really no reason for them not to try to underprice it and sell as many items as possible before the market becomes saturated.

But I do think that it depends on the type of products. The stuff that I do (and the stuff that Eata does) simply can't be mass produced. When it takes months to make a single product, it gets priced accordingly. That's the collaborative efforts where you have original, intricate builds combined with custom scripting from scratch. And as a result, it gets sold copy/no-trans, with no-mod scripts and often no-mod builds as well.

I honestly could never see giving away something full-perms, unless it was something really really basic, like a notecard giver script or something. Hell, I don't like giving out modifiable scripts just out of concern that someone would replace the code with something malicious to make it appear as though I had scripted it.

But different people do business in different ways, I suppose.

Carter-Madhu

Siyu, I'm going to return to example of my cafe again, even though it's not a consumer product. As far as I am concerned, my cafe is a high-quality product created by a talented artist, even though she used some full-perm sculpt-maps and full-perm textures - and even finished products purchased from other creators - to make it.

This is completely extensible to consumer products - the final product is judged on whether it's good, not on whether one person created all of the elements of it from scratch.

If the final product is nothing more than a full-perm sculpt with a crappy texture slapped on it, it probably won't sell all that well anyhow. Conversely, if the final product is a legitimate full-perm sculpt that a talented, experienced artist has created a knockout texture for, than that person will be rewarded for the value added by her texturework. She shouldn't be penalized because she is merely a really good texture artist, who hasn't also figured out how to be a really good sculpty artist.

Siyu Suen

Well, do you look at your cafe and say "wow, I couldn't do that"? In that case, the person you hired put enough of themselves into those components through design and original layout that sure, she did 70% of the work that makes it appealing.

I hired Jen Shikami to do a batch of textures for my feathers once, because I felt that that was one my weaker areas and I wanted them to be of high quality. I paid her once, and she doesn't see any profit from my profits. However, if someone took those same feather textures, the chances are very slim that they'd be able to recreate my sculpted wings or one of my other projects where I used them, just by having the texture. I think that's where my big dividing line is... if you could take the unoriginal/outsourced pieces yourself and put them together with a small amount of effort into the same product or something very similar, that's what I have a problem with.

Ciaran Laval

There are people in SL who like to create but don't like to do the marketing part. If they can find a business partner who will do the marketing for them then surely that's better, the product sees the light of the day rather than staying hidden in an inventory. Marketing isn't for everyone.

LoganBauer

A few weeks ago I would have read this thread and agreed, and said "Well things like Aminom's gemstones or my flowers, that makes sense to me because there are so many different uses, but how many different uses are there for a shoe?"

But then I met this guy who only does texture and prim work, and does an amazing job of it. He bought my roses and I've only seen him use the vine and leaf pieces so far, but he made this awesome armor set with them.

So with that in mind, if a really good texture artist is able to take a full-perm shoe and turn it into something even cooler, I think that's great. I do agree in part with Siyu's logic, but it's very hard to quantify or put into writing something like a 70/30 ratio.

Lets say person "A" takes any sculpt kit and does the bare minimum, attaches a few plywood cubes and calls it a day... while person "B" uses the sculpt kit as a supporting piece in a more complex build. The difference is pretty obvious, and I think that consumers will see this and will not only be much more inclined to buy person B's object, but also will be more likely to buy from person B in the future.

Johnnie Carling

I not condemning people using premade sculpts in their builds, far from it.

But in the case of the boots that made me post this, the most creative thing the resellers have done is to tint the prims.

anyway like i said... I'm probably just pissed off I spent L$295 on something I could of got for much less.

Ayumi

Would you feel the same, if you saw your cafe on another sim.. and discovered that 70-80% of it was pre-fab? Not like, "buying sculptie trees pre-fab".. but literally 70-80%? The 20-30% difference being maybe scripts, and some added poses, a few extra trees or a small building, and 'color' change on some of the things put down to make it different.

There is a huge difference between using sculptie packs to do what you cannot do without sculpties.. Like finishing the cuff to a sleeve, or a collar...

And spending 50 seconds adding untextured torus shaped "studs" to a boot of the "mass produced" variety, and selling it at an original creation price.

Jahar Aabye

I think that the original post was a complaint that these things appeared to be selling far too well. And the thing is, it's not just Johnnie, because Eata started a thread on the same topic not too long ago.