I finally did it. I dove back into 3D design. And, of course, as per my norm I did so by picking a project that had less than a day left before the final deadline, and shortly after a new, full-version release of Blender was published, with which I had zero acquaintance when I began. So, naturally, I failed. =-/ I’l chalk it up to a learning experience.
The project was for the Master Builder’s competition on Upland.me. The models themselves are fairly simple, so in a way it was a wise place to pick 3D modeling back up. But not with less than 24 hours to learn the new software AND copy a building from scratch. I actually got pretty close. I completed the design of the model. I would have had to still bake textures for each of the 4 required mesh, upload the model to a preview site, make thumbnails, reduce the triangles to below 10,000, and then upload to Upland.
This is my very first NeonMob series, and I’m very excited! Over 100 packs have already been opened by the community, and day one isn’t even over yet! Please come collect my series, and keep an eye out for my next, hopefully pro series!
Here is my #AcornCapsuleToys collection, re-minted. I’m gradually getting everything listed, but with almost 500 items so far, it’s a slow process.https://t.co/ODiMUBcs8u
— Mad Squid Productions™ 🇺🇸⚓️ #VeteranOwned (@AIdotAGENCY) May 5, 2021
After making three NFT that were kind of all over the place–and which mostly used old models rendered at new resolutions, if I am being honest–I have decided to launch my very first, all original, NFT Collection on Opensea.io!
While surfing another popular NFT site, I was very impressed by a collection of “toys” created by an artist named Trym Ruud. The Collection is called “RUDE BOY’S.” These collectible digital toys come in the packaging, as it were.
This made me think of all the fun and innovative forms of packaging that I have seen over the years. You know, the kind that makes a product stand out against all of the others on the same shelf. RUDE BOY’S was that way for me, only with NFTs.
Not wanting to mimic Trym Ruud so precisely that it might be considered intellectual theft, I set out to find a form of packaging that was both easy enough for me to model and was invoking of a sense of childhood nostalgia.
I quickly settled on the acorn capsule toy machines that I used to see at every grocery store and gas station in my youth. You still see them here and there, but not like back then. The toys you would get inside, which were usually cheap and simple, would generally cost either 25¢, 50¢, or 75¢. Sometimes they would be $1.00, but I couldn’t afford such high stakes in my youth.
I decided to make five colors, plus a silver and a gold for rare and ultra rare toys. The colors are Emerald, Sapphire, Ruby, Amber, and Amethyst. I haven’t decided if I will depict rarity with groupings of the primary colors and secondary colors, or by the rarity of the gemstone names I have given them. Leave a comment if you want to weigh in!
Here are the seven I have so far:
If you would like to watch the modeling process in time lapse (sped up to ~2750% of the original speed), as well as a preview of the very first toy, and thus NFT, that I will be releasing, you’re in luck:
Sculpting the acorn capsules and a quick preview of FlameBoy!
More like diving headlong, but yeah. I’m trying to make this a new thing for me. I chose to begin with a model that I sculpted a few years back for the Sculpt January competition. Here is what I submitted for that competition:
To update this asset as an original NFT, I opened the blend file in Blender 2.9 and added some animation to the camera. I then used the new Eevee rendering engine to render a much higher resolution version than I ever have before, with improved lighting, etcetera. I exported to a PNG sequence, then imported those PNGs into Apple Motion. Next, I rendered to an Apple ProRes 4444 XQ .MOV file. Finally, I converted that to an animated GIF, with transparency intact.
