Update. March 22
Firstly my apologies that these updates are so erratic - I’ll try and put one out once every couple of months, and more often as we head towards a drop. Feel free to shout at me on Discord if I don’t.
Apex
The behemoth that is the follow-up to CYPHER continues to occupy the bulk of my time — As I’ve said, I’ve scaled up in terms of ambition and depth for Apex 2, and things have been progressing steadily. As of this week, we’re out of pre-production, and heading into implementation and production.
We spent most of the winter on concept and specification of all required services, there’s a lot to do but the project is much clearer and well defined.
There’s new faces in the studio as I’ve bulked out the team in both Tech Art and Visual Development roles to work along side the existing blockchain and front/back end developers from previous projects.
I’m really excited — I’m in talks with a well known visual effects studio with whom I have a long-running relationship to provide some really slick assets in the run up to launch, and I’ve brought in a writer you almost certainly know and love to help with some of the fundamental concept that underpins the transition from CYPHER to where we’re going next.
Other than that I’m keeping it vague. Sorry.
Origins
It’s fairly safe to say the idea of adding animation to the SINGULARITY collection was well received.
SINGULARITY was an ArtBlocks drop, so we’re limited to what I can do but it does seem like if we jump through a few hoops I can stitch these videos into another field on the metadata for a given token.
To do this, and to do this well is a fair bit of work but I think we’re agreed that it’s worth the effort, so it’s on the to-do list.
One of the advantages of going my own way and dropping projects on my own tech is that I don’t have these hoops to jump through for collections like FUSION, which will be the first to get the motion treatment above.
So, while for SINGULARITY the video would be a ‘bonus’ animation, for FUSION we’re going to keep the original minted art available in the metadata (and via the contract on chain) but replace the token representation with the animated version. (So you’ll see video thumbs in OpenSea)
What’s attractive to me here is that the mutations can appear as part of animation, and that you should be able to access any frame in the animation by passing a frame number to the contract as well as your hash.
This means the FUSION collection will remain true to mint, but it will also receive further depth and variation across the collection in the form of animated colour and form modulation by passing a multiple of the frame-number into the existing noise functions which control appearance.
I’m looking at adding the existing audio from the Fusion Generator page to the tokens too.
Once the FUSION update is done, we’ll take look at SINGULARITY but it’s absolutely my intention to get animated versions of every token from both projects available to you via my new website. This will offer the video in a similar fashion to the way the high-res downloads are provided in a gallery for FUSION.
Other Stuff
I’ll be at DevConnect in Amsterdam in April. Drop me a line on Twitter if you’re attending.
I’m still occupying a #tsukamoto channel kindly hosted by the Anomalous Materials Discord server - Pop in and say gm.
As always, questions and feedback are welcome.
For more information, please re-read this article.
