Feeka Café - Wearable Asset Pipeline Tutorial Series

by 0x82d54417fc69681dc74a6c0c68c6dbad5a2857b9 (Malloy)

Should the following $10,000 grant in the Documentation category be approved?

Abstract

After 2 years providing outsourcing art services for real-time game engine metaverse assets, Feeka Café is pivoting from art outsource house to web3 game studio and would love to leave a catalogue of techniques for ambitious wearable artists and designers of all skill levels.

Grant size

10,000 USD in MANA

Project duration

1 month

Beneficiary address

0xCC7BC60bFcC029ecC8357A9c80b4CC51aF67798E

Email address

malloy@feekagames.com

Description

INTRODUCTION:

Hi y'all,

For those who don't know me, I'm Malloy! I came to Decentraland in the beginning of 2021, at that time I co-ran an independent outsource art studio for 6 years and had worked with traditional game studios, creative agencies and large clients in web2.

HISTORY:

My first 3D professional job was at the age of 18 and it was for a digital marketing agency working for shopping television deadlines. After a hectic introduction to the 3D art world and working on product launches like Dre Beats back in 2009, I wanted to get back to my passions and went to university to study game art. During the 2nd year of studies I managed to secure a position as an art intern in a game studio working on launch titles for the Xbox One/PS4.

This isn't a long way of saying I'm old (lol), but I've grown with the technical requirements of an artist over the years and it has left me with a great repetoire of techniques that I've used since making content for Decentraland in order to get, what my business partner and myself deem, the best results with DCL shaders and technical specifications for wearables and for our clients.

We have had the pleasure of creating assets for the following brands/clients in web3 over the last 2 years;

• D-Cave
• Diesel
• Ben Bridge
• Kraken
• Verse Digital
• Deadmau5
• Australian Open
• Bulova
• BBC
• Adidas
• The Vogu Collective
• ANIMO Industries
• JustHype UK

PROPOSAL:

We are proposing to create a tutorial series unlike others before, this won't be a 'beginner's tutorial series' however it will be accessible to wearable artists at all skill levels and information will be easily digestible for every step of the process.

There will be 3 main categories of tutorial videos;

• Concept to Completion

  • How to take a concept from a client, hired artist or even an AI generation and break it down technically to prepare for high resolution mesh production.
  • How to prepare a high resolution mesh with specific rules to follow that will help the aesthetic finish of your final asset.
  • How to retopologise a low poly mesh (ingame ready) with both deformation of animation and texture finish (Unwrapping) in mind.
  • How to unwrap the low poly mesh with specific requirements in mind.
  • How to bake high poly to low poly with clean results and the correct texture map outputs required for further texture finish.
  • How to use the generated maps to create a texture base that is applicable for DCL shaders (Unlit, toon shader).
  • How to use everything generated before in the process so that it can be applied to other metaverse platforms (Interopability).
  • How to use the assets previously generated to render a clean thumbnail for various marketplaces.

• Source Asset to Completion

  • How to take a source asset from a client and make it DCL/Metaverse ready.
  • This will repeat the steps above but with client branding fidelity taken into account.

• Special Case Techniques

  • A variety of videos showing off crazy and fun techniques (Fur, Deformation weighting fun etc...)

The purpose of this is to share the blueprint of our successful run and so that when a big brand comes knocking aspiring teams in this arena will have the confidence to follow through. It will also help independent community brands!

Examples of style:

Golden Snubnose Chungus

Ben Bridge Mascot

Roadmap and milestones

We still have two on-going contracts with clients but if the grant is approved we will be able to record the process of the different tutorial sections and delegate the video editing to our newly hired social media video editor Francis.

We'll aim for the following;

• Concept to Completion series - Aug 14th
• Source Asset to Completion series - Aug 30th
• Special Case Techniques - September 10th

However we'll keep everyone updated as we go and will happily ask questions post milestone releases.

This proposal is summarized due to technical limitations. To view it complete and vote on it, visit the DCL DAO Governance dApp