Lots to respond to. 

@BadKittehCo -- "Ha ha, I thought about Steve coopers Job for a minute, but I only have about 60-70% of the qualifications they need at best...." It's funny. When I talked to a job recruiter, he was handing me a bunch of job prospects, and I'm saying, "Wait -- this one requires five years experience, this one requires knowledge of x software, etc," and he said, "Nah, they just put all that in to discourage the chumps. No one expects you to have all those qualifications." Then I read an article that claimed that on average men who apply for jobs have 50% of the stated qualifications, while on average women have more than 90%. Could be that women feel they need to overcompensate by looking better on paper; could be that, thanks to our culture's particular method of handling romantic interactions means that men get a lot more practice aiming high and getting rejected; could be something else entirely. In your case, you can't relocate (and art school is cool!). Otherwise, you might be perfect for the job. :)

@MrSparky -- I guess there are going to be different rates for 1. make whatever you want, and I'll buy all the rights, 2. make this precise thing I want (plus revisions if it doesn't meet my expectations), and I'll buy all the rights, 3. make something in this general category of things (a car of some sort), and I'll pay you an advance, plus a percent of the sales, and you keep the copyright but sell me first distribution rights (meaning that as long as I sell it, you can't, but the moment I stop selling it, you're free to sell it yourself or to someone else) -- and all sorts of other arrangements.

The things that would give a seller the advantage if there were to pay a creator up front would be that they didn't need to recoup the costs quickly, and that they weren't making models, so could spend all their time selling. The disadvantage would be that if the model just wasn't something people wanted, they'd lose money. The advantage to the creator would be that if their model didn't sell, they still got paid and that they wouldn't have to wait to get paid. The disadvantage would be that if the model turned out to be a hit, they wouldn't make as much money as otherwise. Of course, the model might not have turned out to be a hit if the seller wasn't personally invested in its success. And that's the thing about brokerages. They need a lot of products coming in in order to get and keep customers interested, but in the end, they don't care what sells, as long as something does, and if that's 10 top vendors, there's little to be gained from putting all their efforts behind anyone else. However, if you've paid up front for a model, you have a lot of incentive to sell it. Paying up front is usually how we sell physical goods., and the risk, cost, and profits are divided fairly equally among all three levels of the system (manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer). But for some reason, with intellectual products, we've latched onto a different process. At least in publishing, authors get an advance -- but they still have to pay it back if the book doesn't sell.

Seems to me like a cooperative would do better. A team, as someone already mentioned, with everyone playing to their specialty, whether that's modelling, rigging, texturing, selling, coding, or customer relations might do better. But to really do it well, it'd have to be a pretty big team. And, of course, the advantage of working entirely for oneself would no longer exist for those artists who really enjoy (and perhaps need) that kind of independence.

@Shane -- A buyer of indie content isn't going to be able to pay studio wages. But it would be nice, wouldn't it, if a creator could at least reliably make a set minimum on each of their products as long as the quality was consistent? To get paid without being completely vulnerable to the whims of the marketplace.

It's my belief that good marketing responds to the demands of the customers, and great marketing creates the demands that the company is prepared to fill. But where is the Steve Jobs of the Poser community? :D

@kljpmsd -- I guess it depends on why you want to sell content. I think (though I certainly don't know) that a lot of vendors decide to make their products available for sale, not because they expect to make a living wage from them, but because they want to release them for people to use (which is its own kind of joy) for the love of simply making them and seeing them rendered -- but at the same time, they'd like to recoup at least some of the costs. Occasionally, such folks will hit pay dirt because the quality of their work is so high and they get lucky by meeting a demand. In any case, it's not an all or nothing proposition, unless you're selling product to pay your bills. I doubt that most vendors are, or even expect to -- but I certainly don't claim to know.

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PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.