Before you start submitting products you will need to get an understanding on how products on IMVU work.
All products (sans stickers) on IMVU follow a family tree structure, everything ultimately being a decendent of an IMVUinc ‘base’ or ‘root’ product and every product inherits the assets of its parents.
-In this example of a female garment it all starts with the IMVU base avatar. This is the bone structure all avatar products are built on. (rooms and furniture follow a dif hierarchy.)
-Next is an IMVU base product, in this case the ‘Baby Yellow Tee’ that you met in IMVU’s beginning product making tutorial. This is used to tell the product it will be worn as a replacement body part.
-Next in line is the Content Creator’s mesh. This is a new 3D structure and new textures that were made by a 3D Content Creator.
-And lastly is the 2D Artist’s retexture of the new mesh, they are the ones who retexture the mesh into art.
Above is an example of how a deriving chain should look. A new mesh is Derived from an IMVUinc base product, that mesh is set to derivable and texture artists derive from that to make their recolors. Each retexture is linked to the original mesh product making for the shortest line possible to the root product.
But what happens when one of those recolors is set to derivable and is unknowingly derived from? And again? And Again?
Excessive Chain Deriving
When a product is derived it inherits all aspects of the parent products, including all the costs of those products along the way.
This one started out clean but the Content Creator with the red icon in the middle had set their item to derivable. In and of itself setting an item to derivable is not bad thing or against the rules. The problem arises when someone derives from it.
in the example above several other Content Creators have derived from that sub product (the first red zone). Each of those Content Creators has to pay and sell at an inflated price not only paying the original mesh fee but they are also are paying the Content Creator in the middle his full price.
Drop down another rung in the chain and another layer of fees and complexity is added on.
In real numbers, supposing each Content Creator along the way has marked up their product 100cr. That means if I don’t look at where I am deriving and my product ends up in one of the question mark slots my breakeven cost and deriving fee will be 550- 650 credits! This is for a mesh that should only cost you 350 credits!!!
It is ALWAYS best to keep this deriving tree as compact as possible. Long gangly tress make for overpriced and slow loading products.
What does this mean as a Content Creator?
At each new rung of the chain that product has most likely added on a fee, this could be anywhere from a few credits to thousands of credits. Those fees are not only needed to be paid at submission but are also paid each and every time the mesh is sold!