This week’s cover is a depiction of Minecraft breaking its ties with NFTs and the resulting fall of NFT worlds’ prices. Will it survive on its own? That is for the future to decide.
Clearly, it is hard to predict the future, and we can unanimously agree after creating the artwork for Gazette 97. The big news for discussion was the Minecraft announcement, following which came the collector who got rekt and the ruins of 888. Minecraft being on top of the list we decided that the style be Voxel Art, also we had the reason that it was only used once before for Gazette cover artwork.
I was advised to briefly check out how the software Magica Voxels works so that I can have a grasp while working on the artwork. It’s like how most things are– nice to play on the shore when you can’t swim but once in deep waters, you’re wishing you didn’t leave home at all. With the little knowledge I had acquired, I set out to create the terrain as we had planned. That didn’t come out so well given my excitement, misunderstanding that I was free to play with the sketch, and my devious methods to create it.
We had to start over again with the terrain. Thankfully we found a tutorial on how to create heightmaps for terrains and we milked it for some nice-looking terrain that would fit and hold our elements together. After the terrain was chiseled and made perfect we started to create the different areas and elements: a 888 castle in a mountainous region, a forest and farmland, a barren desert, and a snowscape. These regions were divided into different parts by Dudly so that both of us could work simultaneously on them. Around 7 hours later we had before us what we had imagined, but that was just the beginning of our problems.
Towards the end of finishing the artwork, we learned that rendering the sun cycle video in cinema 4d would take us an enormous amount of time and energy as we would have to create several settings that do not get exported with the file. Upon understanding this situation, and realizing that there were no scripts to be found to render it in Magica, Dudly whipped out a master plan– that we render each frame and stitch it together as a png sequence. After the plan was set, we went on to add more details to the artwork like the police at the doorstep of the Latvian artist Shvemblr, oil wells burning in the desert, and a crypto shrine in the farmland showing how far its effects are in the south Asian countries(yeah, just made that up rn) and so on.
At 19 UTC( IST 12:30 pm for me) this looked like no problem, but little did I know that at 4 am rendering each frame would feel like a nightmare. Thankful Dudly cut short this nightmare by half as we divided the work and were both rendering frames checking of an excel sheet(oh man, if not for that excel sheet) that had the designated parameters of the sunlight and intensity.
Once we had the 180 frames and had not made any terrible mistake in rendering the frames Dudly put them together in a preheated AE and baked the baby out in a few minutes. We had a beautiful sun cycle of the Voxel landscape that took us more than 50 combined hours to build. Oh boy! That was a crazy feat looking back on a chill Monday evening. Cheers to many more crazy cover artworks as we inch closer to our grand 100th Gazette!
Stay tuned folks, as we dive into the next week and build another killer cover!
