I've friend on VR chat and VR chill, I say give it a whirl. See if you like it. Though, rumor has it SL is revamping their tech an may have VR soon as well

What, make avatars for SL? Might do, though what about legacy technology going all the way back to prims? And what about it's appearance when compared to modern game engines?

Second Life is currently prepared, in the next month to three, to slide over to a PBR (Physically Based Rendering) layout, retaining support for the older diffuse-specular rendering pipeline, but removing the earlier non-Advanced Lighting Model system, in an attempt to modernize. The PBR setup is GlTF compliant, finally separating things so you have the albedo, roughness, metallic, emissive, and alpha (including blending and masking) as separate channels, in addition to retaining support, as prior, for use of normal maps. There is talk of but not yet movement on increasing the available texture size to 2048x2048, but the bandwidth issue there remains a bottleneck (it is currently capped at 1024x1024). It will also support the use of reflection/light probes to allow for realtime dynamic environmental reflections, with significant discussion also ongoing about the inclusion of realtime avatar mirroring.

In addition to this rendering-engine change, SL will retain the ability to use legacy systems such as the highly-deprecated sculptie and the still-in-major-use prim.

I have actually seen the PBR test viewer and how much of a visual improvement it provides even over legacy materials, and it is a significant boost with little to no hit in the frame rate department even for complex, complicated builds which previously had caused noticeable viewer lag.

I will have to take a look, and see if I have to return to fix the textures on previous aviation product. I have some PBR experience, but not a lot of toools to create it. Adobe bought Substance Painter, which jacked the prices up, and made it subscription. Life is too short for subscription software.

If VR and associated AI advances as fast as we're being threatened with, there will be a market for highly personalized VR avatars. Don't put all your $7 eggs in that one basket, but it's a market worth keeping one's eye on?

The Market is wider than I thought. But it's definitely decently sized with more than one VR Environment, plus those folks that DON'T do VR, and use the models strictly in Blender for adult purposes, which for the money, I am not opposed to. But the requirements become very different.

I get people asking for rigged blender models every once in awhile for porn animations. (I don't take commissions.) There is way more demand than artists are available. Check around and see what fair prices are. Usually from mid hundreds to low thousands of dollars for a good model with a rig, materials, fur, shape keys, etc. Vrchat models go for a similar price range.

Are these one off custom models, or models that are just available to the public? Where would the high end models sold? I don’t think Turbo Squid allows adult content. I know Gumroad is where VRChat avatars are sold, but public rated ones seem to be around $40-50.

The $500+ range is usually for one-offs. Each model is treated as an individual commission. Here's some pricing examples for you to get a feel for what other people are doing. Most of these examples are NSFW.

Animation-ready models (rigged, textured, facial expressions, etc; only works in blender etc):

 zorryn has some of the highest visual quality models I've seen and his prices seem to be around $1500-$2000: http://transduced.net/cc/ (price calculator). He works in Cinema4d though which isn't something most people gravitate towards these days (usually Maya or Blender). Everyone else in this list uses Blender I think.

 drakossacerdos ranges from $200 for a retexture of a base model to $1600 for a model from the ground up.

 ruaidri makes Blender animation models of this quality level + a minute of animation for around $1000 USD: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/40419609/ (NSFW). Disclaimer, I am biased because I think his animations are the best out of the list ;)

 magnaomega does Blender commissions $600+: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/40289793/

 yogher does Blender commissions $450+ https://www.furaffinity.net/view/48932816/

VRChat (SFW):
Kaideart on Twitter makes complete VRChat models with textures, rigging, etc for $600-$900: https://kaide.art/

L.U.X charges $500 for a simple rigged model and $700 for VRChat-ready models: https://trello.com/c/ualhWfGC/185-image

At the other end, you have VRChat models that are broadly available to the public. These ones are in the $40-60 range because enough people buy them to make the cost investment worth it. It's the same amount of work/quality! Just subsidized by volume. Julia Winterpaw is a good example here.

Definitely Gumroad is one of the big stores, but some people also sell on ko-fi. Maybe itch.io as well. Sketchfab also allows you to sell models but since they're owned by Epic/Tim Sweeney, who also owns Artstation and has absolutely ass-tastic takes on AI art and artists' rights to not be scraped into a dataset for other people to make money off of, I personally steer clear of them. I don't know which ones explicitly allow NSFW.

A Blender-specific option for SFW prop selling is blenderkit, which uses some kind of scoring system for pricing that takes into account repeated asset usage. Kinda neat. Haven't tried selling there but I do use blenderkit for background props. https://www.blenderkit.com/docs/fair-share/

IMHO, from the examples I gave you, price starts losing meaning once you get above a certain point. Some of the artists who charge less make subjectively better models IMHO. (Some artists also charge less because of foreign currencies and cost of living, mind you.) Some of what you're paying for is a specific expertise (e.g., ruaidri's animation skills or kaide's VRChat SDK knowledge).

Hopefully these numbers give you some idea of what people are doing!

Thank you so much for this information. Going to be poking at this for a while. So I guess I will have to rig from scratch, and no commercial rigs, then. Fur is a bitch though, and most of my experience has been for game engines, which meant minimal bones, and not a lot of extra controls available, because real time engines choke on that.

Nah, the secret to good rigging is knowing how to adjust and use a rig, and good weight painting. Anyone can use rigify or ARP but using them well is hard!

Don't feel bad about using tools to get a higher quality product for your customer. ARP and rigify are great. You see them a lot in custom models even. And I've used some awful homebrew rigs.

That being said if you want to learn about rig making, because rigs can be fun, P2design has fantastic rig and anim tutorials from scratch. Recommended.

Part of p2design rig course focuses on game rig so it might be worth looking into. Fur is always a bitch no matter what lmao. Check out Hair Tool for cars based long hair tho. Blender market has lots of helpful plugins and assets and courses. Gumroad too.

Well, perhaps. I'm not sure about 3d modeled avatars, but if someone made avs that were more realistic than most of the crap currently populating the video chat/stream market (think 'Facerig' and its subsequent iteration) people would go for it.

If I could've gotten an AV with the quality of Rocket Raccoon rather than the horrible stuff they had as facerig and they do now under its current name I would've paid a great deal and actually used it.

Now folks use full on mo-cap and pretty intensive avatars, but the realism and quality just isn't there.

Well, how do you think the Doe looks? At some point soon I will probably make Asheru, but as an avatar, or simply a Game miniatuyre I haven't decided.

There is always a market for quality vehicles up on the SL marketplace. Seems like the ones that are of said good quality which are affordable are relatively speaking the jewels in the rough. Outside of SL, in general there is a market for quality vehicles as well, especially in the Poser and Daz3D venues.

THI was the Aviation comp[any on SL I started. We were model and script snobs, along with Laminar Systems, ZSK, and Shergood Aviation. Our problems were with other that slapped scripts they got from the marketplace into unoptimized geometry from free 3D sites. The problem was that attitude spread from cars on SL to aircraft, then tanks and then warships. It happened over and over again.

Interesting, thank you for telling me this. Yes, I know what you mean, there are quite a few of these trash vehicles driving or flying about on various sandboxes out there. They don't look good and appear as though they handle like a brick. Out of curiosity, are any of these sellers that you mentioned still around today? I'd like to look them up and see what they've got up for sale! :D

As far as I know all the vendors still have some product around. Money is money. THI has vendors at Honah Lee Surf, and and OLD one at Blacktail Ridge. I haven't taken them down and they still earn enough to pay their own rent. Shergood Aviation makes the nicest Helicopters in SL, and her stuff was irreproducible, so we rarely get cheap, trash Helicopters, unless you like space ships. Laminar has vendors everywhere. ZSK is a bit rarer, but their models are so beautiful. If you like airliners, look for Adventure Air. Also on Honah Lee Surf.

Ah! Thank you! I will be sure to look them all up and see what they have up for sale!

VRChat and Vtuber avatars are a big market right now, you can't go wrong with that. Certainly introducing a new style of avatars will put you in a good niche, I have found most avatars out there to be "classic toony" and perhaps overrepresented. See what other folks are charging for it [a few hundred $ for each I've found] and get involved!

A lot of good suggestions here already but I would add markets for DAZ studio which cater mainly to "stock" 3D models provided you take the time to learn how to use it. There is also a look of of 3rd party site for it was adult content.