Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Personally, I'd want better than minimum wage for skilled work with someone I don't know or don't know if I can trust.
I've done freelance gigs (in writing) where I either got paid late, a different than agreed on amount, or never, and it's a risk to consider.
That was what I thought, considering I'd do the same, hence why I never bothered to ask xD. I would love more anime style giant mechas and I remember one of the few PAs that made one (https://www.daz3d.com/great-greymalkin-robot), a very awesome one I would like to add, saying somewhere that it made almost nothing or something like that. Sooo... I'd imagine the commission price for a similar one would be pretty high. There are still some making some mechas sometimes but they are more "western" battletech types, which I also buy on the spot, but not what I want for a board game I want to make for a while now.
When someone hires me for a commission or even buys something premade, part of what they're paying for is the benefit of the 15,000+ hours I have invested in honing my craft (not 3D assets, obviously). When I hire someone else, it's almost always because they can do something that I can't. It doesn't matter what their 9 to 5 is, they deserve fair compensation for the time they spend doing the skillful thing that I, an unskilled person, literally have to hire someone else to do for me.
If I had unlimited money I'd contact a couple PAs about creating some complex outfits that I desperately want and will never see in the store naturally. Since I don't and therefore cannot afford the many, many thousands of dollars that would be a wholly reasonable price tag for highly detailed content that would either be exclusive (my design) or very niche (I doubt at least 99 other people want the same random stuff as me), I don't waste their time with asking. They've got better things to do.
Well, since the OP is going to look up Blender tutorials, they'll learn on their own how long it takes to make quality content. It might be more than an hour though.
Flashbacks to my last foray into Blender where it took me a good three hours to figure out how to do some completely mundane thing because it had been given a weird name, bizarre shortcut, been changed between versions, and I was having trouble guessing the correct search terms.
You mean you discovered a design feature?
Also, with freelancers you're not only paying for the work itself but also the gaps between projects, and the time and money spent on training and equipment.
(Also also, no one should have to justify wanting more than minimum wage.)
I think it's good you're going to learn modeling in Blender. It definitely would take more than an hour to model and texture a decent pair of boots, and in the future you will realize the problem isn't that you "naively assumed people would quote what the job was worth" but that you underestimated the time and effort needed to do the job. Although, offering $200 and hoping the artists would try to negotiate you down from that on their own is an odd approach. But when you can model things yourself, you don't have to commission people since you can spend the hours needed to make things to your exact specifications, instead of complaining that people in the forums are nerdsplaining when they try to suggest products that match what you said you wanted. People are trying to be helpful, but naturally lack the necessary psychic skills to know you have looked at all of the footwear for G8 in the entire Daz store and already found them unsuitable for your needs.
As to the subject of commissions and mimimum wage that has come up here: quality content and skill usually requires paying more than minimum wage. Minimum wage is supposed to be for unskilled workers, not skilled or experienced professionals. If someone is willing to work for less than a living wage in their country, they're likely not that good (though some talented artists are young, desperate, and easily exploitable). These days some people act like minimum wage is the default or average wage not the minimum, and I'm not sure how that happened. Sometimes you should pay someone more than minimum wage, and not just when they're a doctor or CEO. We've got to stop acting like the default artist wage should be minimum wage - the starving artist archetype isn't aspirational or romantic in real life. If employers can find people willing to do a job for minimum wage, they aren't going to pay better than that.
If a freelance art job pays less than minimum wage, the artist is better off working at McDonalds. And even at minimum wage they're probably better off working at McDonalds. Commissions aren't fun hobby time, they're a job where the time taken away from fun hobby time (or family time or hanging out with friends) is compensated with money.