Many 3d artists, including myself make an extra buck by selling 3d models on sites like turbosquid, so you may already be are aware of the fact that turbosquid keeps 50% of everything you sell. If you also take into consideration the fact that your remaining share is subject to a tax (10% – 30%) for vendors outside US, you realize that you end up with pocket change.

But things seem to go even worse…

Some days ago I received a newsletter from the admin at The3dstudio.com, in which he stated that he had been approached by several members that sell models on both TS and his site. These people told him that members from the turbosquid stuff had tried to convince them to sell their models exclusively on turbosquid, in return for higher royality rate of 60%. The bad news is that they were also told that everybody that chooses not to sell 3d exclusively will have the royalty rate reduced to 40%. (Actually he hasn’t specifically named the site, but it was more than obvious that he was talking about turbosquid)
At this royalty rate, if you sell a 50 dollars product, and if you are subject to a 30% tax of what’s left, you end up with 14 dollars (not to mention the bank transfer or paypal withdrawals commissions).
On the other hand, the3dstudio already offers a 60% royalty and promises to give a much higher percent to anyone who decides to go exclusive with them.

From the buyer’s point of view, I believe that TS will become less interesting, due to the fact that most sellers will raise the prices of their products after this.
Already the difference between the prices of similar products on these 2 sites is noticeable, but if this royalty change isn’t just a rumor I’m sure the difference will become much more than noticeable.

I’ve also heard from top sellers (people with more than 1000 products in their inventory) that if this is true they will remove all their models from turbosquid. So far the only reason why turbosquid is ahead of the3dstudio is because of larger inventory, but I guess this can change as well.

Since TS hasn’t given any official response to this yet, we will all have to wait and see.

What about you? Are you selling items on one of these sites? I’m curios to hear about your experiences.

Even after a few years since linear workflow (also known as gamma 2.2 method) first “appeared”, there still is quite a lot of confusion around the subject.

This is caused by the fact that there are several methods to achieve the same result and several tutorials on the internet most of them explaining different workarounds.

In this tutorial I will try to show all the steps that I use for linear workflow (working with 3ds max and vray) and keep things as simple as possible.

Bellow there are 2 images; the first one is rendered without linear workflow while the other one is rendered using this method. Although the second one looks much more natural, due to the even illumination and without color bleed, both of the scenes have exactly the same number of lights with the same light multipliers.

Click on the image to view a higher resolution rendering

Step 1
Go to “Customize”, “Preferences” and click the “gamma and lut” tab.
Check “Enable gamma /lut correction”, type 2.2 in the field next to “Gamma”.
Under “Materials and Colors” check both “Affect Color Selectors” and “Affect Material Editor”.

Step 2
In the material editor, select one of the materials and click on the texture in the diffuse channel. In the Bitmap Parameters rollout, click on the path of the bitmap and in the pop up window, under “Gamma” check override and type 2.2

If you haven’t started the scene from scratch and you are using an older scene, you must repeat the step above for all the textures that you have used.
This is what most people forget to do and as a result they end up with washed out textures.

Step 3
Believe it or not, you are now ready to render
The only thing that you need to do when the rendering process is ready, is to save the file as an .exr format (you need a 32 bit image, not an 8 image).
If you need to convert it to a jpg, open the exr file in photoshop, click on “image”, “mode” and choose 8bits/channel.

Just out of curiosity, you can try to save the image as a jpg directly from the render. You will end up with a dark rendering. This is because the gamma is not burnt in the image, but with the settings shown in the previous steps, you have set 3ds max to display it correctly.

If for some reason you need to burn the gamma into the image, you need to activate the Vray frame buffer, and under the color mapping options change the gamma from 1 to 2.2
I really don’t recommend doing this tough, because of the loss of quality.

The advantages of working with gamma 2.2 are obvious… less lights are needed to setup a lighting rig for an interior scene, less color bleed, faster rendering times, etc.
I use this for almost every daylight interior scenes; for interiors with night illumination I tend not use it since I find it easier to get more “drama” in the renderings, the old fashion way.