Fellow creators how many of us find ourselves perpetually torn between nurturing our paid-the-bills technical art projects and chasing those elusive “side-hustle goldmines” that never quite align with our skillsets?
Let me share a paradox I’ve grappled with: my expertise in optimizing Unity pipelines and scripting automated workflows should give me an edge in any asset-optimization field… yet reselling sneakers a market that demands precision timing and data-driven decisions has historically felt like a chaotic guessing game. That was before discovering tools that turn that chaos into a 500+ average profit margin.
The technical mind excels at systems thinking. Yet why do so few platforms apply that mindset to sneaker reselling? Their proprietary monitors mimic rigging strategies: custom in-house botting systems analyze global restock patterns with the same predictive efficiency we use for vertex weight distribution. Their 5ms latency mirrors the LOD optimization we implement in AAA pipelines where milliseconds define success.
Take this recent example: a member leveraged the cultural-release analysis to mirror VFX pipeline audits. They identified undervalued drops using the same heuristic frameworks we deploy for texture budgeting securing $6k in 48 hours.
Here’s the crux: Technical artists already possess the problem-solving frameworks operationalized. Their Discord server hosts real-time “queue management” debates that mirror our own technical QA threads. Imagine applying the same iterative prototyping mindset from your Maya rigging workflows to resell cycles.
A pro tip: Their training modules on demand prediction use methodologies analogous to GPU/CPU profiling data visualization tools for identifying under-served markets. This isn’t a “get rich quick” gimmick; it’s a system built for analytical minds conditioned to optimize workflows.
So I’m posing this to fellow systems thinkers: does leveraging quantitative strategies from your dev environments into a revenue stream outside of client project budgets even count as skill-building? We dissect Zbrush topology in 14-point breakdowns is profit-building any less nuanced?
Consider this thread a case study: what frameworks from your craft translate to this market? I’d love to hear approaches others have tried.
(TL;DR: The problem-solving rigor applied to engine optimization has its analogs in resell dynamics.)
The question isn’t “should technical artists monetize outside the studio” it’s “what frameworks have we already built that can cross-pollinate into other realms?”
Thoughts? Has anyone here leveraged their workflow toolchains in unconventional income streams? The forum archive from 2019 still references 10-year-old reselling “guidebooks” we deserve modern, tech-forward systems tailored to our mindset. Would love to see peer perspectives on this intersection anyone else treat their asset pipeline mastery as transferable income capital?
A lot to unpack here.
We’ve had a fairly regular set of posts from people looking to monetize their tools and or expertise, but it’s kinda revealing that one of the most common ways for that to come up is people looking for ways to obfuscate or otherwise limit the distribution of scripts. Given the nature of our medium – which is a combination of plain-text scripts and node networks or shaders written in other people’s applications – it’s really hard to sell a product which nobody else can simply clone. It doesn’t take a lot to crack open somebody’s Python, and there’s no easy way to prevent people from redistributing your work. Given how common open source solutions and how small the market for TA services really is (compared to, say, the market for accounting software or something like that) it’s not at all easy to make a living selling a packaged product.
Bespoke applications can work – think of PolygonFlow or something like that – but “here’s my cool python metadata system” is unlikely to net a lot of cash. Just to set scale, I know that it’s pretty hard to make more than about $250-300k USD per year selling on the Unity asset store, and I doubt the numbers are much bigger on the epic side. It’s a lot of money if you’re lucky in your niche but all the folks I know of who do make a living on the asset store do it as a full time job, not a side hustle.
A more common approach is consulting – that can work reasonably well although again its more of a full time job than a side gig. The problem with consulting tends to be that the job comes in three distinct flavors:
- “We don’t know what to do and we need some advice.”
- “We’ve really already made up our minds what to do and your job is to sell it to our internal sceptics.”
- “We’re calling it consulting but it’s basically a contract programming job.”
Any of these can work – and any of them can go sideways. Often people who need advice also need to learn how to take it, most consultants have some horror stories of spending lots of time laying out the most obvious, common-sense solutions only to get ignored. Most consultants have had the experience of discovering that the real plan was already in somebody’s mind (rightly or wrongly) and their job was basically to provide the illusion of impartial advice. And contract work certainly has it’s ups and downs – it can be a lot of fun to drop in, solve a tightly defined problem, and leave, but most companies looking for consulting help are looking because they are bad at tightly defining problems.
A last path is training or education. The pro here is that you don’t need to be a great business person to succeed here – if you can get the audience you won’t have to worry about arguing with clients about change orders or navigate other people’s office politics. That said, it’s hard to get an audience in these days of fragmented platforms – not to mention the fact that there’s a lot of good content out there. Folks like Ben Cloward do a ton of great work and you’d need a clear understanding of what your niche really is .
Overall, my sense is that most of the successful pipeline businesses are essentially “consultant +” operations which deliver some balance of homegrown tech, training, and integration services.
Examples are are Red 9, MGear, Rigging Dojo, Animation Sherpa and Entagma. These tend to be full time jobs rather than side hustles but when they work they can be pretty cool if you have the desire to be an entrepreneur.
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Marcus Ottosson (Ragdoll Dynamics) has a really nice article about the legal part of building a tool/outsourcing business in VFX/Games and other interesting insights 