Hey Frens! We have witnessed yet again a busy week in NFTs, and as always, close to its end, we were deciding what topic to be featured on our cover. And the fingers ended up pointing at the Art Blocks. No surprise, as generative crypto art is on the rise constantly, so it was right about time to show our love on the front side fully.

When Art Blocks was launching snowfro was describing it as a vending machine for generative art. Red remembered that and proposed a vending machine concept; I pushed the idea further with Claw Arcade Game. I sent this sketch to Red, and he replied laconically just: "OK." We are swamped the last couple of weeks, tirelessly working on new stuff, so he trusted me on this one fully.

The analogy in this piece is quite brilliant. The kid's joy and happy surprise coming from each and every Art Blocks mint are glorious. If you haven't minted any AB pieces yet – what are you waiting for? You can even mint our own AB project "Gazettes".

I started with assembling the Arcade box, which was pretty snappy, basically just four walls with aluminum framing. For the back panel, I prepared custom Art Blocks texture made of Chromium Squiggles to reflect in the front glass.

Luckily, I found a ready-made model of the claw on the 3D asset market, saving me some time. For the animation, there were two options to choose from: Try to simulate the mechanism using IK (inverse kinematics) rigging or animate each part by hand. After few attempts to do it the smart way, I ended up with the second dumber manual labor. Still, a lot to learn tho.

Let's move on to meet the blocks, cubes, boxes, whatever you like to call them. I had to manually download all Art Blocks mints to use them as the cubes' textures. Then use a cloner feature to generate a random group of them within a given space. And in the end, I used dynamic simulation to let them fall into a random pile. Repeated that many times with different seeds until I was happy with the composition.

The last remaining and important part of the animation was this young boy playing the Art Blocks Claw Arcade. The same auto-rigging process was used as it is with our Bahdoon mascot animations. Sadly, there was no time left to play with facial expressions.

The last resort was the sound design and picking the right music. I mixed and edited few samples to give the video more life and support the playful atmosphere.

All done in about 30 hours. 💪

See you next week.