How these animated dino NFTs are rendered in the cloud with Conductor

Behind the cute Claynosaurz ecosystem, and the technology used to realize 10,000 ‘Clayno’ 3D animations.

The team behind Claynosaurz – a collection of 10,000 3D animated NFTs with a prehistoric theme – needed a way to render their characters. Indeed, it was not only the animated character, but also a still image, which created another 10,000 rendering tasks.

Finally, they would turn to the Conductor cloud renderer for the job. Here’s the story of how Claynosaurz came to be, and how Conductor became the key to making the characters possible. before and after spoke with Claynosaurz co-creators Nic Cabana and Dan Cabral.

A ‘Clayno’ in motion.

b&a: Can you give me a brief overview of what Claynosaurz is and how it works?

Nic Cabana and Dan Cabral: Claynosaurz sprung from the idea of ​​turning traditional branding on its head and creating a new IP in an affordable, low-friction way. Instead of jumping right into creating longer form entertainment, which requires significant time and money and is high risk, we saw the new Web3.0 NFT space as a way to soft launch our characters and gain a following, while we helped finance the project. At the same time, we are NFT collectors ourselves, so we were very thoughtful about what we wanted to build and how to release it. Claynosaurz is our parent brand, and our Clayno NFT drops serve to extend that brand and reward our fans with collectibles.

Claynos are colorful, stylized versions of recognizable dinosaur species, designed to be universally appealing and gender and culture agnostic. The first Clayno NFT collection of 10,000 pieces was released in November 2022 and quickly sold out. This collection featured six dinosaur types, with each NFT characterized by a different pose, animation and distinct skin pattern. The hope is that we will expand the Claynosaurz brand to other areas as more people discover it. We currently have a global team of about a dozen artists working on Claynosaurz, most in a part-time capacity, and the Clayno NFT collection has generated more than $30 million in value.

b&a: How do you approach designing new characters and giving them distinctive personalities? Do these start as pencil sketches etc? How do you work them up into 3D models?

Nic Cabana and Dan Cabral: Most artists have a side project, and Claynosaurz came from a design originally developed by Dan. He first drew them as pencil sketches from different views, then fine-tuned the fine details to sort out the proportions. He also focused on making sure the facial expressions were legible, which is important because the designs are relatively simple. From there we started using Zbrush for modeling and Maya for topology.

Our first character in production was Rex, and initially we thought we could use the same facial topology for the six characters for easier rigging, but we ended up rigging each character separately. Then Dan handed over the design for rigging and lookdev. We paid close attention to the textures and how they were applied; we knew that if a texture fell apart at a seam or stretched strangely, it would be immediately noticeable.

b&a: What approach do you take to animating them with a clay style, and then rendering them, in terms of tools and workflow? And for the teaser trailer, can you break down the challenges of realizing a fun promo piece?

Nic Cabana and Dan Cabral: The Claymation style is more a result of our lookdev, but selling the movement comes down to having the right jiggle in the animation. Fortunately, many of our artists come from the VFX world, so we know the importance of weight in animation. We started with basic block-like movements, then added weight until it felt right. Artists primarily used Autodesk Maya to create the animations, then we rendered with Arnold, and sent to Conductor through Maya to render with cloud computing resources. Textures were created with Adobe Substance Painter and Photoshop, and also some Blender.

Dialing in the look and movement of the characters was our initial focus, but then we began to expand our team, and artists skilled in environments came on board so we could build out the world of Claynotopia. The environments were designed around the characters and from the ground up, from rocks and pebbles to the trees. When we saw the characters in these amazing environments, we knew we had to make a trailer. We had so much amazing art to work with; our biggest challenge was choosing what to include.

b&a: And how did Conductor get in here? How have you used cloud rendering to help in the process?

Nic Cabana and Dan Cabral: The sheer amount of work we needed to do for the Clayno NFT collection was daunting, and we needed to do it quickly and economically. Not only did we render 10,000 animations, but each NFT was paired with a still image, creating another 10,000 rendering tasks. Buying hardware was immediately off the table; we’re a startup and a bunch of thousand dollar GPU cards weren’t in the budget (even if we could get them). We were exploring real-time rendering with a game engine, but had no game developers on the team to guide that effort.

We also wanted to reuse the assets in production and Arnold gave us the look we wanted for that. We looked at cloud-based rendering solutions in almost every major region, but none provided the confidence we needed to know our assets were being rendered with the correct licensing in place. So we started asking around, and a friend at a boutique animation studio recommended we look at Conductor for cloud rendering.

Both animations and still images were required.

We started working on Conductor in April 2022, initially focusing on fine-tuning our settings to optimize the look and cost of our renders. Our implementation was primarily managed by a lead animator and a technical director—roles that don’t typically involve rendering wrangling—and they found it very easy to use.

Moreover, they were well supported by the conductor team. As soon as we were ready to go, we started our final render in October and completed the required 20,000 tasks in about eight weeks. Due to the volume of tasks and the fact that we were using Spot Instances, we submitted our work in batches, running a few hundred tasks at a time, to reduce risk.

Spot Instances are good from a cost perspective as they are reserve computations offered at a deep discount, but they can be reallocated to a higher paying customer at any time, which will cause our renders to fail. Fortunately, we didn’t encounter too many problems on that front. We were also able to track rendering costs for each NFT through Conductor and use that data to inform pricing. Conductor was critical to our process, and it continues to be an important tool for us.

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