Space Jam NFTs for Nifty’s

In the Spring of 2021 I got the chance to work with Palm NFT Studios to help design and animate a series of NFT digital collectibles for the upcoming Warner Brothers’ Space Jam 2 film.

With the use of Cinema4D, Octane and After Effects, we designed five unique looks and 3D environments for each of the six rarity levels ( Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary, and One of One ) — with the goal of being able to composite and integrate 2D character artwork, logos and type into with the cg renders seamlessly and procedurally in order to generate 80+ unique variations and deliverables.

Fellow colleague and 2D / 3D designer Justin Mays and myself had just under two weeks to complete the design process and get the green light to move on to the planning and execution for laying out the various versions.

With the help of OTOY’s RNDR — providing distributed GPU rendering on the blockchain — we were able to render CG environments quickly and efficiently. The RNDR network could complete a job in under an hour that would otherwise require an 8 to 10 hrs to render on one of our 3D workstations running the latest RTX gpu cards. This allowed us to make updates and iterations to the 3D animations very easily and without having to to concerned with render bottlenecks on our workstations.

This allowed us time to focus on the set-up for the 2D integration / compositing side of things, which we felt would need to built to work as procedurally as possible with the design layouts we had created. I put my programmer thinking cap on and built out a JavaScript expression-laden setup in After Effects using the Master Properties features added in recent years. The procedural setup allowed us to toggle between different character artwork and their coinciding text animations for each 3D environment using a single slider control.

The procedural setup controlled varies layers and effects inside a network of After Effects precomps like mattes, layered glows, text animations, utility passes and “grey layers” (used for preserving and applying specular / reflective detail for glass and metallic surfaces onto the artwork for further integration). This procedural setup was a crucial foundation for the final execution and rendering of the 80+ deliverables.