DeFi Frens Art & Generation Pipeline
The DeFi Frens pipeline involves almost every element of the modern-day visual effects industry: From 3D modelling, animating, and rigging, all the way through to the final composition. Throughout every step of the process, we have experts in their field contributing to our project.
It all starts with Champu, our Lead 3D artist.
He creates the style of the DeFi Fren. 3D traits are designed from the ground up within C4D; one of the industry’s main 3D tool kits. He starts by sculpting a virtual object into a desired shape, think of a sculptor and how they mould clay. Then he paints his new creations with textures, like a miniature painter, so that it is up to the visual standard of every other amazing Fren in our collection.
Once our Frens trait is looking good it’s over to our animation team. They prepare our new trait by giving it bones. Known as rigging in the animation industry, this process allows us to control how a Fren will move by letting each bone affect the corresponding part of the body.
Once the rigging is complete the team can start animating the character. This involves moving the characters bones from frame to frame, similar to stop motion animation, to create whatever movement we want the character to have. This could be the standard walking animation we have all the way up to special 1 of 1 animation loops.
Once a trait is prepared within Blender it gets fed through our Blender script. Designed by our developer, this takes all our traits: 150+ hats, 130+ outfits, 20+ eye traits, and 6 animation cycles, and procedurally generates over 2 million possible Frens combinations. We then curate all these individual Frens combinations to create what we think is the best possible 5,555 Frens for our final collection. But even with our final Frens having been chosen, we aren’t done just yet.
To make our final Frens look as amazingly real as possible requires the use of a render engine. There are many engines to choose from, here at DeFi Frens we use Octane renderer, which is one of the leading industry standards. Rendering engines work by taking a virtual scene that you have prepared, turning it into a realistic 2D image like the one from a camera’s sensor when you take a picture. They do this by firing millions of beams of virtual light that tell the camera exactly what our virtual scene would look like if it were in the real world.
There you have it, the process behind the DeFi Frens coming to life. Stay tuned for more information on the progress and on how we’re building the tooling to help other artists and projects incorporate animation in their creations as well as further building a community accessible open-source tool.
