Async.Art & Polygonal Mind - The cube

The Mission

With the event of The Megacube, created by Polygonal mind, a lot of prices were given and a lot of crypto partners have the opportunityof promote themselves.

One of this partners was Async.Art. A place where you can obtain and create Programmable Art.
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From this collaboration the first 3d Piece of programmable art was created. The Cube.

Resources

• Maya
• Textures

What is Async.Art?

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As I said before, Asyn.Art allows you to create and collect programmable, but what does it mean programmable?
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I think a better way to express it will be to say that it changes depending on the owner.
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How does it do that?

Well usually, when you create a piece of art, you create an unique piece and upload it to the site. there you can proceed to sell it or keep it. However what Async tokenizes are two things:
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• The Master: which is the final piece of art.
• The layers: which compose the piece of art

Think about it like photoshop, you have your file that has your work, and you divided it in different layers to work more easily, This not only applies to photoshop but also to video edition software or even 3D.

2D diagram of how Async.art works, the frame also acts as a layer

This allows that the same piece of art can be owned by several people, one with the master and others with the layers.

But how it changes? This changes come with the layers. More specfically with a State changes.
State changes are, as the name indicates, different states of the same layer. This states can change at any given time, which in turn will change the look of the Master.

This can be changed by layer owner. Or even automatically, by different events such as time, cycles of day or night etc...
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Making the art become alive.

Cube first steps:

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How do we translated all of this to a 3d Model? When I first started working on this, I thought there were diffrerent ways to work on this.

But one thing that I had clear was that my master layer have to be the UV map of my 3D model. The question was how to divide the UV map and create the different layers.

As I saw it we could work this in the more basic maner making each face a different image, and make one image for an UV.

Or play with the different UV's to change the looks on the image of the cube.

So on the first steps on this project I tried a simply approach and create an uv map that allowed to test how can we divide the cube, in order to see how can we divide the different layers.

At the same time we decided on the shape and style of the cube, we finally decided on the cube, because we couldn’t forget that this was thanks to the Megacube.

With a similar style that is called Outrun style or retrowave, chracterised by its Dark backgrounds and neon lights decorating the scene.
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Once we tested the layers, we decided on divide them in three layers which 3 different states each.

First design of the cube

Example of uv map cube

Style & Final result

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So once we have the different states and layers, came the moment to create the model. For that purpose, and in order to play with the deep that allows the 3D.
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To do that, we played with the transparency, a moved the faces , to put different levels in the same space. That way even thought the external shape is a cube, we can add more detail inside.

Final Cube in 3d with master

Once we did that, it was time to prepare the layers and divide them, so that the owner could change not only one thing but several along the different faces. 

Finally we decided to divided it on the background, the different faces and the frame. if you want to test how the texture changes, you can test it here:

https://async-explorer.herokuapp.com/test/canvasID=601450ca99a999001248f783

​And here is some of the possibilities in 3D.

Cube with different layers

Conclusion

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This was a fun prize to make and make discover this new way to create art. I had heard about it before, but it was when I tested it that I discover its possibilities.
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If you want to see this cube you can go to decentraland and see how it changes.

​Laura Usón

​​3D ARTIST

​Passionate about videogames, movies and creatures. artist by day and superhero at night.

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