My Process
Over the past two years, I've been drawing new traits for this cup of coffee without having any plan for them. I floated a couple of ideas for minting these, but it wasn't until ApeChain sparked a renewal in NFTs that I found a home for them, so I set to work.
My original plan was to manually layer about 100 pieces, but this wouldn't have showcased all of the traits in combination with other traits, so I decided to expand the colleciton size. It would have been too tedius and time consuming to try to manually layer 1000 pieces, so I needed to automate the process. There are tools out there to do this for you, but I really wanted to be able to give each piece the "yeah" or "nay" before it went into TCC.
So I exported every trait as a png file, which enables transparency so only the trait is showing. I then built a custom script to randomly combine traits, which I call The Percolator, and ach trait was fed into a trait class (background, mug, coffee style, etc.) When the script runs, it choses one trait (which can also be None) from each class and layers them in the appropriate order. Each run through the script displayed a new, randomly generated combination of traits. If I like the output, I'd hit 'S' to save and the script would save the file and add the traits to a csv file.
I then spent a bunch of time generating outputs and giving them the thumbs up or thumbs down. I had an overall vision for what the collection should look like, and some trait combos just didn't fit this vision.
As I did this, I was also generating new traits. The original output did not include a Texture layer, and I felt the collection was looking too "flat," so I added textures to the background colors to give them a little more depth. I was also refining the artwork for existing traits, so I new I'd need a way to rebuild each piece with the latest artwork once the curation was complete.
Along the way, I also cut some traits that just weren't working well with other traits.
Over the course of about two weeks, all of the artwork was finalized and I curated a collection of nearly 1100 pieces. Once done, I wrote and rand a script to look for near-duplicates - pieces that had more than four traits in common (ignoring the coffee style.) Fortunately, there were very few, if any, that were too similar to other pieces to be included.
I then randomized the rows in the csv file of traits to ensure an even distribution of trait appearance, and to make sure that the 1/1's were spaced out throughout the collecdtion. I had added these all at once, so the collection needed to be shuffled.
The next step was to rebuilt the collecdion with the final artwork. Again, a custom script was built to read in the traits for each piece from a csv file and re-layer the traits. After a little debugging, it was working great and I could rebuild the whole collection in about 8 minutes! I repeated this process using the same csv file to generate the json (metadata) file for each piece, ensuring that the metadata matches the artwork for each token....phew!
The last step was to add in the Honorary Cups, and the collection was complete!
This was a LOT of work, more than I had originally anticipated. When I decided to launch on ApeChain, I started curating an AL thinking that the mint would be in about a week. Well, here we are about three weeks later and the drop is still a week out.
But I'm very happy with the process and the final collection, and I learned a lot along the way, so it was all time well-spent.
Thanks for reading, if you've made it this far!