At CADRE PICTURES we are constantly looking for ways to push our boundaries.

In recent times, we were approached by a number of clients to explore the tradable animated digital assets world of NFTs.

Delving into the specific needs to produce what was being asked of us, made us acutely aware of the specialist technical skills required as well as the sheer volume of artistry necessary to prepare all of the assets. So what better project to push, and ultimately, extend our boundaries. Bring it on we said.

Traditionally, we are used to producing and delivering animation in the context of a narrative and a story brief, but with digital assets in the NFT world, it’s a different game altogether where we were producing one-off assets with unique traits and variations – literally thousands of them.

For one client, we worked collaboratively to develop an initial collection of 10,000 unique heads - designed, created and rendered in just 3 weeks! A very steep learning curve, and most impressively, the error rate on the final renders was less than 0.1%. That’s an error rate of less than 10 renders! Crazy. The entire collection sold out within 90 seconds of launch!

Subsequent phases included FX simulations on the character heads and a deflationary mechanism which allows existing NFT digital asset holders to sacrifice one digital asset to upgrade to another with rare traits. Combinations are worked out and random traits are added to the 3D file, along with physics simulations, and all in a matter of seconds during the render time.

Another one of our clients is one of the larger players in the NFT universe - NFTeams. As they describe themselves, they are:

‍“…the first worldwide sports league on the Ethereum blockchain with 10,000 unique sports franchises battling it out for major prizes”.

NFTeams already had an offering of numerous NFT 2D character assets and had approached us to take these further and bring them into the 3D world. These 2D characters comprised of four base humans, an ape, a robot version of all of the above and additional special characters we can’t reveal too much about right now!

NFTeams Promo Video

A 30 second teaser video created to excite potential investors.

Each rendered character would have a different face and body shape, from stick-thin all the way through to sumo. Each character would also require variations of their features, with over 500 trait options such as hair style and colour, jewellery, clothing, tattoos and then these would be randomly assigned at render time to create 10,000 x 6 second turntable renders. If you do the math, that’s 1,000 minutes of final renders, or 16.7 hours! That’s the equivalent of watching Toy Story twelve times non stop.

Phase 1 of this collection included 6 second turntable renders of 10,000 jerseys (minus the characters) across 6 different sporting codes, which took 14 days to render 24/7, with an error rate of only 2 turntables!

To realise a project of this enormity, automation via very clever coding would be required and that’s where Cadre Pictures founding partner Ben Bryan took the lead to produce a pipeline that could facilitate the throughput. Ben also designed an ‘auto-tool’ for all deliverable camera views & formats from the one render submission – JPG, GIF, MP4 and FBX.

NFTeams has a number of phases to the overall project, some of which are not scheduled to be completed for a few months, however, a select number of ‘teasers’ of the 10,000 unique characters have been shared with their community.

In addition to the NFT asset creation, we produced 2 x 30 second HD teasers in the more ‘traditional’ animation workflow.

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Software used:
‍3DSMAX, Redshift, Mari, Substance, Zbrush, Photoshop