Animator James Curran renders 3D NFT assembly using Conductor

James Curran is not afraid of the bleeding edge. As an animator, he has always been attracted to new software and new forms. He dabbled with Flash as a teenager, and learned to use Autodesk Maya and Adobe After Effects at university. He has worked in video games, orchestrated month-long GIFathons in foreign cities, and collaborated with major brands including Samsung, T-Mobile and Disney XD via SlimJim Studios and Partizan/Making Pictures. His latest career development has taken him into the world of non-fungible tokens (NFT), which provide new opportunities for artists to share and monetize their work. Today he creates NFTs as part of the Random Character Collective, an incubator for NFT talent that includes animators Lucas Zanotto and Markus Magnusson, and has more than 233,000 followers on Discord.

While Curran has primarily worked in 2D animation throughout his professional career to date, he began returning to 3D a few years ago, which required a new approach to rendering. To get scalable on-demand computing power that he could access from his MacBook Pro on the go, he started researching cloud-based solutions and found the Conductor cloud platform. “Some of my work was taking way too long to render locally, and Conductor was the first rendering solution that worked the way I wanted and expected. It really made things so much easier for me.”

Conductor has proven key to Curran’s latest NFT collection, a 3D version of his sold-out SlimHoods collection. With 5,000 randomly generated, hoodie-wearing characters minted as NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, the SlimHood collection was created using a generative color block design that draws from 10,000 possible color combinations, as well as from various accessories, hair styles and facial features for millions of unique possibilities. After Curran designed and animated the base character in After Effects, he used logic coding to pull together variations of the animation elements. Each SlimHood was purchased blind through the dedicated website using cryptocurrency and a smart contract, and then minted from a unique combination of individual characteristics with literally billions of possible iterations.

“In the end, I tried to create characters that would represent anyone, and the hoodie is pretty ubiquitous,” shared Curran. “The coding for the combination generation was not as difficult as people might think; I found the most challenging aspect to be figuring out how to actually release an NFT collection.”

Curran enlisted developer Mikkel Malmberg to build the smart contracts to stamp the NFTs. When customers made a purchase, they received a link with the asset and all important associated data. He also had a technical artist build the first character rig. For the SlimHoods 3D NFT collection, Curran rebuilt his designs in Maya, using what he’s learned in the NFT space so far to help other artists.

“After my SlimHoods collection sold out, I talked to Lucas and Markus about forming a collective,” explained Curran. “I wanted to help them sell their NFTs as well, and it made sense to combine our efforts and share everything through social media channels. We restructured our community on the Discord app, brought in more moderators, and things really took off from there.”

The Random Character Collective launched in November 2021, and its first NFT drop included Zanotto’s Mood Rollers, followed by Magnusson’s Invisible Friends. Having a scalable rendering solution like Conductor has helped the collective prepare to expand their capabilities and guide artists who want to create for the NFT market. It also helps Curran keep the setup relatively simple. “I travel a lot so I usually have the highest spec MacBook available and use the Conductor for the heavy lifting when I need to,” he explained. “The Conductor submission tools in Maya are easily accessible, and if I need to render Invisible Friends in Blender and SlimHoods in Maya, I can run it in one account and keep track of everything more easily.”

Curran got into NFTs, both from a creation and purchase standpoint, because he happens to like them. “Beeple (aka Mike Winkelmann, a graphic designer from Charleston, SC) definitely started to make the concept of NFTs more mainstream, which helped us all,” he noted. For young animators looking to jump into the NFT world, Curran’s advice is to take your time and simply do what you love.

“People feel like they’re going to miss an opportunity, especially with something so new and of the moment. But if you don’t first figure out the best way to approach the concept, it’s not going to work. Don’t rush anything,” Curran emphasized. “When I started NFTs, I was still creating the same artwork, and didn’t change what I was doing completely. The NFT world is just another way to release what all of us in the collective are already good at and work on every day.”

For the latest on the SlimHood 3D NFT Collection, stay tuned or check out the latest updates for the Random Character Collective here: https://twitter.com/RNDMCHARACTERS.

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