Strange Fruits

Created by Ian Strandberg (VoidStrummer) and Jaime McGough, Mildewds is an exploration of the potential and limits of procedural character creation in Blender.

We built our Primordia Saturnus system to generate expressive characters that feel like more than dead-eyed mannequins trying on sunglasses. We used a combination of programmable deformers, blends between sculpted elements and shape grammars to pry these particular picks from among the parameters.

Blend It

The Primordia Saturnus system is built on my Cousins shape grammar in Blender. It adds the ability to mix and match custom sculpted parts (facial features) in an organic way. There’s a lot more potential in this approach. I’m looking forward to probing it further.

The system also makes use of deformers to further develop the silhouette and attitude of the characters it suggests.

The logic for these tools was built in Python.

NFT Origins

The rise in popularity of crypto collectibles and profile picture collections in particular was a boost to my existing interest in procedural illustration and design so we explored NFTs as a means of supporting the work.

However they emerge in the final analysis, NFTs are a fascinating execution on a collection of basic ideas about value, scarcity, attachment and how we relate to digital things.

In the end we sold all of the Primordia Saturnus characters we produced to a bunch of cool collectors. Thank you!