Ryan Maloney scaled his NFT project from hand-drawn Crunchy Cows to 10,000 unique characters using generative design. He created 25-50 variations of base elements in Procreate, exported them as layers, and had developer Jasir build a tool that stacks them to produce rare combinations in minutes.
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Here's how I designed 10,000 characters for my NFT line. When I first started drawing Crunchy Cows, I thought I could draw 5,001 cows. Do you know how long drawing 5,001 cows would take? I won't do the math on here because you don't want to see me do math, but it will take a very long time even if I drew 10 per day. Instead of drawing these manually, we're going generative. I've been looking at how to create characters for many, many years. I have a couple of ways to do it in Photoshop and Adobe Animate, but I needed 10,000 characters. Then Jasir reached out. Absolute animal developer, delivers on everything he says on his website. Go check out that URL. Jasir told me he could code a generator that would take the elements of each drawing and stack them on top of each other. So instead of drawing one character, I would draw all of these parts separately and draw 25 to 50 for each category. Then we'd rely on the code to create the rare combinations. Once I was done with the Procreate drawings, I sent them to my computer, opened in Photoshop, and exported the layers to PNG files. This speeds up the designing of the characters because you can create one base and change the color of it multiple times. I swear it was within 2 minutes, Jasir sent me these samples and I almost cried, I was so happy. So plan out your characters and think in layers. If you like this video and want to learn from my creative projects, follow wherever the follow button is. And if you have friends in NFTs, send them this video. Thanks for watching.
