Last month, I mentioned that I set up a gig on a website called www.fiverr.com, where I offered to render someone's Sketchup Model for $5.
Well, after a month of waiting, like buses, they all come along at the same time. I've now done six jobs and potentially, there may be more to come. And at last, they were clients who understood what I offered as part of my gig. I guess most who didn't were lay people who thought I could just conjure something out of thin air with one or two clicks and it'll only cost $5.
Having worked on those jobs, I've found it's a bit more work than I expected. The trouble with some models is that there's still a bit of fiddling around before it's render ready. My renderer, SU Podium, is a third party plug in for Sketchup, so no surprises that there might be a few technical issues from time to time. Other people wanted materials added to the material, but even without all that fiddling about, at the most fundamental level, you still needed to set up and test the lights. That can take as little as 15 minutes or an hour, depending on how the model was set up and how many lights there were/the client wanted. To top it all off, the model needs to be rendered and that can take hours depending on the settings used.
I guess I should probably have anticipated it over time, given I used to do this full time for a living.
If I get the chance to 'Level up', then I will probably structure my gig so that I get at least reasonable recompense for my time. I'm thinking of doing something similar to stock photos. A small sized image might go out for a very affordable price (in the case of my gig $5), but larger resolutions may cost more, etc.
Anyway, it's starting to feel like a real business. I'm getting more emails than usual, but I wonder if it's just a last minute rush to Christmas. In my experience, things tend to get more hectic as major public holidays approach, mostly because employees are chasing pay rises, so the work comes in thick and fast.
Still, all that extra work done is no bad thing and hopefully I've won a few regular clients.
That said, I don't think Fiverr is going to replace my previous job as a major source of income, so I guess the ideal thing would be to try and get a few more contacts or sit tight and hope that more clients with serious work will come my way.
I've had one or two people asking me about full scale 3D Visualisation services. One or two of them appear to be put off by the price I quoted (or they're just taking forever to come to a decision). I'm still negotiating with one or two others. If they don't balk at the price I quote them, then I might have some real work to do after Christmas and the New Year.
If it goes as planned, then it will have come full circle. This time last year, I was made redundant from my previous stressful job and since then, I've tried to find something that didn't involve 3D Visualisation as my experiences leading up to my redundancy almost put me off 3D rendering for life. But now that I'm essentially working for myself (even if it's for peanuts), I'm beginning to rediscover some of that 'job satisfaction'.
Who would have thought?
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