🎨Art

Social Identity

Last updated 2 years ago

🎨Art

Social Identity

The art of an NFT project is a key metric that differentiates the 'blue-chips' - the uniqueness of each NFT is imperative. Hence, we have spent over 2.5 months ensuring we maintain a high standard across all 2555 Dragons. Here's how we did it.

The inspiration

Our project's visual identity is largely inspired by Pixar. We hope to capture the personality, colors, attitude and creativity they have instilled within their characters. Furthermore, the idea behind choosing a 3D art style was important to us. Why? Because one of our founders is a professional 3D artist, on-top of that we also believe 3D art is under represented on Solana.

The creation pipeline

Step 1 - Character design: Our character design drawings initially define the form and look of the dragon. This process involves hours of brainstorming to ensure each dragon design can stand on its own. Here's 1 of 7 of our early dragon designs...

Step 2 - Concept drawings: Concept drawings are used to get a feel and look of the world we are building. The drawings communicate to the 3D art team what the overall tone will be. In a sense, they concretize original ideas, bringing to life what may have previously merely been a discussion between the team.

Step 3 - 3D creation / asset process: After we have finished the 2D pipeline (steps 1 & 2) we then forward the designs and concepts to our lead Creative Director (Mattia) to sculpt. The Dragons' team uses Maya, the industry standard. Each dragon is carefully crafted with multiple renditions and feedback periods to ensure there are no flaws at an artistic and fundamental level. Single assets can take upwards of 5 hours to complete.

Step 4 - NFT generation, rarity & rendering: The layering and rendering process is much more complicated for 3D NFT collections relative to 2D. All of the created traits and base mesh's have to be layered and subsequently rendered within Maya (software). This guarantees aesthetic consistency compared to rendering each trait separately and combing them in Photoshop after the fact. To pull this off, we created a custom script / plugin that works native in Maya - the script handles all things from rarity to trait combinations. It was difficult, but worth it.

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Last updated 2 years ago

The inspiration

The creation pipeline

Step 1 - Character design: Our character design drawings initially define the form and look of the dragon. This process involves hours of brainstorming to ensure each dragon design can stand on its own. Here's 1 of 7 of our early dragon designs...

Step 2 - Concept drawings: Concept drawings are used to get a feel and look of the world we are building. The drawings communicate to the 3D art team what the overall tone will be. In a sense, they concretize original ideas, bringing to life what may have previously merely been a discussion between the team.

Step 3 - 3D creation / asset process: After we have finished the 2D pipeline (steps 1 & 2) we then forward the designs and concepts to our lead Creative Director (Mattia) to sculpt. The Dragons' team uses Maya, the industry standard. Each dragon is carefully crafted with multiple renditions and feedback periods to ensure there are no flaws at an artistic and fundamental level. Single assets can take upwards of 5 hours to complete.

Step 4 - NFT generation, rarity & rendering: The layering and rendering process is much more complicated for 3D NFT collections relative to 2D. All of the created traits and base mesh's have to be layered and subsequently rendered within Maya (software). This guarantees aesthetic consistency compared to rendering each trait separately and combing them in Photoshop after the fact. To pull this off, we created a custom script / plugin that works native in Maya - the script handles all things from rarity to trait combinations. It was difficult, but worth it.