It all started with a typical situation: a client writes to me: “I want a wow effect within the budget.” We talked, but the contract was not signed. My rates seemed high. He thanked me for my time and left to look for a more budgetary performer in the open spaces of the freelance exchange. Came back after 2 weeks. He spoke about an unsuccessful collaboration with another freelancer and admitted that “the miser pays twice.” We discussed the project again and this time came to an agreement. I signed an hourly contract with Anthony to create the Starship NFT collection.
Having opened the contract, Anthony sent me materials and added them to the general chat of the project. In a chat, I met a concept artist. Hooray! She speaks Russian! Why am I so happy? The fact is that after looking at the concept art, I realized that we would communicate with the artist a lot. All references in ¾ are half-turned, with perspective distortions. With this view, it is difficult to build the correct ratio of the parts of the model.
The artist was so charming that she agreed to draw additional views of some of the details for me. So that I can model without deviating from concept art.
Work has begun. First in Blender I modeled:
- Frame
— Cockpits. 3 options. In the original concept, there were more, but to speed up the work, we decided to leave only 3 - Engines. 5 options - Wings. 6 options
– Armament 5 options
Then in Substance 3D Painter I made textures separately for all elements.
According to the concept, it was supposed to make 5 painting options. I made the first version of painting each element and submitted it for approval. After approval, it remained 4 times to repaint, add textures to the file and send to the client.
After generating the main collection, Anthony asked me to make 2 more ships with unique textures in gold and glossy black.
My client also acted as a programmer in this project. He wanted to render himself and even picked up 4 backgrounds on 3D stocks.
We found a new experimental Blender script that could switch materials within a file. Anthony first tried rendering from a nearly 2 GB file with all the models and textures, but his computer couldn’t handle it. I did the optimization of the scene - I rebuilt the file for each color separately. It turned out 5 files about 500 MB each.
I also made a promo video to promote the project in social networks before the launch of sales. For quick production, I used UI models, interface, asteroids and planets from 3D stocks and did only animation and editing.
Bottom line: the total time of the project is 110 hours calculated by the tracker at work, plus another 90 hours for all sorts of experiments and clarifications. It was interesting. + one more NFT project in the portfolio. I benefited from all the courses I took.
