What are NFTs?

NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are unique cryptographic tokens that exist on a blockchain and cannot be replicated. NFTs can represent real-world items like artwork and real estate. “Tokenizing” these real-world tangible assets makes buying, selling, and trading them more efficient while reducing the probability of fraud.

Toe in the water

Scarlet Thunder was a character I created for the specific purposes of creating an NFT collection to sell on OpenSea. I was interested in this technology predominantly as it enabled a way for me to sell my art but in particular, I saw it as a long-term investment. This is one of many future collections but Scarlet Thunder was sticking my proverbial toe in the water for the first time.

Character back story

Scarlet Thunder is a deadly Kick-Ass, Kamikaze, Yakuza Assassin. Just like Kung Fu Panda, she was left outside a Buddhist Temple in a basket and grew up schooled in the deadliest of Martial Arts. Constantly wondering where she came from, she became frustrated with all of the goody two-shoes, fortune cookie philosophy and craved mischief and adventure. She left the temple and became friendly with some Yakuza miscreants. Accruing a sizeable gambling debt, there were two options of repayment – start sucking on the wrong kind of “lollipops”, or become a hired fist. She chose the latter and put her kick-ass Ninja skills to good use.

With the use of some good detective work, I was able to track Scarlet down and grabbed a few sneaky snap-shots of her doing some ninja training in her mysterious hide-out. I’ve posted the photos here and thankfully she was wearing her mask, otherwise I don’t think I’d be around much longer if her secret identity was leaked on the internet. If you don’t see me producing any more NFTs in the future, you know what happened to me.

Behind the Scenes

Below you can see the 3D model used for Pose #9 – a screen shot taken from 3DS Max. I used VRay to render this out and composited using Photoshop. I also used Phoenix FD to simulate the fire effects for the poster image of the Burning Dragon Siduel.

The character is generated in Daz 3D using the Genesis 8 female as the base. Some elements were re-purposed from my existing Daz library and I used a combination of different assets to create the character I had in my mind. Once all the poses and facial expressions were set I had the tedious task of exporting each pose to 3DS Max and recreate the shader network in VRay. I prefer doing my rendering in VRay as it is one of the most flexible render engines and I could achieve the mysterious and moody lighting effect that I wanted to achieve. It was a lot of fun experimenting with different lighting setups, poses and camera angles to achieve some nice results. I was quite surprised to see how photographic some of the shots looked and for once not a lot compositing was needed.

There will be some original characters that I will design from scratch that will be coming in the future but that was not really necessary for this project as Daz caters for human figures very well. I have previously created dragons and demon characters which were sculpted from a single ZSphere in ZBrush and if I get enough heckles on social media to show them I will share them at a later date.

Burning Dragon Siduel

This is the emblem of Scarlet Thunder and it is included as unlockable content with every purchase.
The video is HD format (1920×1080). MPEG4 codec with no audio.
You can view the animation below.