Create Abstract NFT Crypto Art with Cinema 4D + Photoshop

1. Intro: Welcome to this course on creating abstract and FT crypto art using Cinema 4D and Photoshop. In this series of lessons, we will cover a lot of topics to give you a solid understanding of the crypto art space, including the creative and technical steps involved in creating crypto art with an overview of four pieces covering 3D modeling, nurbs, texturing, lighting, and post-production. Resources will be included for educating yourself about the crypto art space and suggestions for learning about cryptocurrency. The potential risks you may encounter including high fees, fail transactions, and missing artwork. How to submit your artist's profile to various curated websites with a checklist of to-do items and creating your first NFT, ready to learn various methods of creating NFT crypto art in cinema 4D and Photoshop. Enroll today. 2. Twisted: Welcome to this course. Thank you so much for signing up. So what we're gonna do in this course is I'm going to walk you through four different abstract pieces of art that I created from that I created in cinema 4D and Photoshop. And here's what they look like. So what I'm going to be doing is walking you through the process of creating all of these using Cinema 4D, NURBS, objects, splines, cloners, effectors, and all kinds of other stuff. So what we're gonna do at this point is we're just going to jump in right into the first project. I'm going to walk you through this process of creating this one. So as you can see, I have my main geometry, main geometry background. I have some lighting and a camera. So I'll just go ahead and turn to some of this stuff off so you can see this clearly. So I'll get into how we can create this abstract form right away. So what we're gonna do is I'll show you first and foremost how to use this sweep NURBS object to create this. So I'll turn all these off just so I could show you the process. So the first thing that we're going to do is just create a spline. So I went up here, click my Spline Pen tool. And now what we could do is we can go into the top view and just go ahead and create some sort of curvy spline. Hit Enter on the keyboard. Now we can go into our points mode. And we could select some of these, kind of tweak them a little bit. I'm hitting E on the keyboard here for my move tool. Just so I can tweak these handles a little bit. And there we go. So there's spline number one. So what, what we're going to need additionally to this spline is another profile spline, so I'll use a rectangle. And then what I'll do here is go to my Scale Tool. Just kinda scale it down a little bit. And then I will add a little bit of rounding to this. Now all we have to do is go up to this icon which is our nerves. Go to sweep, Shift, click both of these and just drop them under the sweep nerves until you see that down arrow. And that's going to create a form. Yeah. Alright. Now we can start messing with the way that it tapers off. So if I go into that, but first and foremost, I'm going to make this initial rectangle maybe a little bit bigger. So make that bigger. Then when I can click on the sweep, what I could do is I can go to N scale and just kind of taper that down. So now we have this really nice little form here. And to create the rest of our geometry are all gonna do is I'm going to start messing with this form and I'm going to start duplicating a few times. So. I'll hit Command C, Command V on the keyboard. Take this, maybe I could scale this down a little bit. Hit R on the keyboard for rotation, maybe grab this, pull it up. E is for your Move Tool. And I'm holding down command to create a copy. So now I'm just going to start messing with this form until I get something that kinda looks cool. Alright? And the other thing that we could do here is instead of duplicating every single one of these to look exactly the same. I can go back into the spline and we can click this little checkmark so we can disable the sweep nerves, right? So if we go to our point mode, select the spline. Now I can go in here, select some of my points that get start moving these around to kinda tweak that little curve. Alright. So let's just go ahead and enable our sweep over time. So I'll just continue playing with this. So I'll take this command C Command V to duplicate it one more time. I'll move this over. And I'm just kinda start playing with some of these shapes. Right? I can move that maybe over here. And all you're going to need to do is just go in here, duplicate, play with it until it starts looking pretty cool. All right, and that's basically what I did for this entire form. So if I turn all these off, here's my white's. Turn that on. So here's this, I just kinda made this twisting little thing. Here's another one. And another thing that I wanted to show you is this cloner. So if I create another sweep nerves, so we can actually just use one of these up here. So if I take the sweep, I can actually make it multiple duplicates using a cloner. So I'll just duplicate this one more time. I'll scale this down. Maybe turn this one off. And I'll just 0 out this position. So 0 tab 00 and apply that puts it directly in the center of the 3D environment. I'll 0 out this rotation and I can just add a cloner. So if I go MoGraph Cloner and I drop this, we've been through this cloner. It's going to make a whole bunch of shapes. So now if we go to this cloner, I can try something like a radial column. So that gives me something totally different, right? We can increase the amount of clones here. You know how, how far apart they're, they're offset. We can go into this transform and start messing with this rotation right here. So that's going to give us some pretty interesting looking shapes. So that's basically how I created this other form right here. This little thing right here. So I just used, use the cloner, duplicated that shape. All right, and then I went through, created some additional shapes. Right? And to create a material, I tend to keep all my materials is very consistent as far as the reflectivity and, you know, the the basic attributes of my material. So I'm just going to double-click to create one. So I'll just call this white. And I'll leave the color at some sort of like off white gray. And for the reflectance, what I'll do is I'll go ahead and remove this default specular. And then I'll add a reflection legacy. I'll take the brightness down that way it gives me a little bit of reflection in this. And additionally, I can add a little bit of funnel to this. That's going to give it a little more realistic look. Take that for now, down a little bit. So now I have my first color. If I wanted to, I can just go through and just start texturing these things that I just made. Right. So to keep things consistent with all my forms, what I'll do is I'll take this first initial material, hit Command C, Command V to duplicate it. And I'll just create like a yellow, orange type of color. All I have to do is leave this reflectivity reflectance as it is, go into my color channel. And I'm just going to choose some sort of like yellowy orange color and I have my second color. So now I can just put that on there and just continue texturing until I tell him happy with how this looks. Alright, so here's what I ended up with, with this one. And then I went through and I created a background. So for the background elements with load. So I just created a bunch of landscapes. Pretty straightforward. So all you need to do here is I'll turn that off. Let's come into this basic parametric primitives halves. Create a landscape object and I can hit T on the keyboard. To scale this up. We can start scaling this way. You can start messing with the height of this. So if we go into this height, that'll give us a little bit more hills. I can grab these little things. Push those over. Command, option drag, Command, drag to make a duplicate. Now I can go on here and I can take this landscape and I can just mess with the seed value down here. And that's going to give me a different shape of a hill, right? And I can just continue going through, maybe duplicating this one Command, click and drag. We can hit R on the keyboard, rotate this 90 degrees. And again we can go through mess with the seed value until we get something that looks kind of cool. I'll duplicate this 11 more time. And then just take this height way down. So it's kind of like a flat little valley area. You can just bring this down a little bit until you get something that you are happy with. And actually this one needs it come down. So it's not penetrating some of these little things. Probably all these needed come down a little bit. But you could just mess with that until you come up with something that you're happy with. All right, after this, then you can start lighting everything. Alright, so for this light setup, I'm just gonna go ahead and delete all this stuff. So for this light setup, I kept it pretty simple. I have an overhead light that I made, which is an area light. So to create that, all you need to do is come up to your lights, create an area light. Bring that up, rotate it 90 degrees. And all I'm doing is grabbing these little yellow nodes and pushing that over. And then I'll create some additional lights, come up here and maybe add some fill light on the side here. Maybe color this a little bit. So we can name this light fill. And we can duplicate that command C, command V and throw another fill light maybe over here. Maybe this one wants to be a little grayer, something like that. That's just going to fill in this side and this side with these two fill lights, then we have our main light coming from the top. And lastly, what I'll probably do is add a background object. So I'll come up here. Background, I create a new material. Let's just kinda Matt know reflectance. Put that on here. Now I want to add an additional sky with an HDRI image in there. It's for some reflections into these forms. So go to Sky. I can go to Window Content Browser, and I could just search for HDRI. If you just hit this little search field right here, type in HDRI. And there's some decent ones are already existing in the Content Browser. So double-click. And now I can just put this on my sky. And I don't want to see this in the background. So what I'm gonna do is I'll right-click and add and add a compositing tag. And this compositing tag, I can just say Seen by camera. And what that's gonna do, it's gonna allow the background to show through which is this white. And it'll allow this HDRI to have some reflections in our form. 3. Controlled Chaos: In this video, I want to show you guys the process and the techniques that I use to create this image and this image. Here we are in Cinema 4D. For this, what we're going to start with is we're going to use this lock NURBS object. So I'll go ahead and turn this off just to show you this process. So first and foremost, and we're going to start off with a rectangle. So I'll just take this rectangle. Hit Command C, Command V. I'll just kinda play with this. Maybe hit T on the keyboard scale this one down. Now I'll duplicate this one again. Command C, Command V. Bring that one up and maybe scale that down again. And again. I'll duplicate it and scale this down. All right, so at this point, all we need to do is grab this loft nerves. And I can shift, select all four of these rectangles and just drop that in there. All right, so now that kinda looks a little jagged. What we're gonna do is we're gonna go this loft and I'm going to check this loop option. It's gonna make a little circle. So now I can come in here and I could start rotating some of these. The more of a circular type of shape. So rotate this one like this. There we go. And I think this one probably needs to be tweaked a little bit. There we go. That looks kind of cool. So now this loft, I want to get it a little bit more, that little smoother. So I'll just come in here. We'll need to play with these numbers until we get a nice smooth image. Okay, so that's basically the technique for this. Now we can start going through and we can mess around with this, with the shape just by grabbing some of these rectangles, moving them over, doing whatever we want with them. Right now, it looks kinda cool. So you'll have to just get in here and start messing with it until you get a shape that you like. Additionally, what I'm going to use on this form is us a few deformers. So I'll go ahead and group this together and just save file group objects. And then I'll go to bend deformer. I'll put that in this null. And what I can do is I could just take this up, make it a little bit bigger, so it kind of encompasses my entire object here. Then I can start messing with the strength. There we go. So now I get this little bend in my form. And additionally, I'm going to use this twist to former. So I'll put this in this null as well. Bring this up, hit T on the keyboard, just to kinda scale this. And I can come into this twist and just start twisting this a little bit. There we go. So let's just turn this off. So now we've got this, which looks kind of cool. So at this point what I'll do is I'll take this, I'll rename it, Let's say loft one. And then I'll throw this inside of a cloner. So if I go MoGraph Cloner right away, that's going to start making some duplicates of this. So if I go into here, instead of a grid, I'll just go linear. And I'll just offset this parameter right here. And make a bunch of duplicates. Maybe bring those together. And again, once you get this form created, you can do whatever you want with it. Object tab a rotation. I can start messing with some of these parameters. Get a more interesting shape. And they just have to go through play with this until you get it exactly how you want. So I'll just walk you through my little form that I created here. It looks like a big jumbled mess right now, but it actually looks cool once you get some lighting in there and all the other stuff. All right. So here's the first one I created. Just like I showed, you, dropped it inside of a cloner. Add a little bit over rotation to this. And then I went to here. I duplicated that one more time with a bunch of cloners, just mess with these parameters. The rotation, the number of objects in this. You just have to get in here, start messing with it until it looks good. And I create an orange one. So for this orange one, the only thing that I did was instead of having this loop function on, I uncheck this, right? So it's not a closed loop. So there's ends to these. These are lofts created it with the technique that I showed you. And then I created this yellow. Again, I added a few cloners to this just to kind of clone it around some of these orange ones. And from here, all I did was I added some lighting. So there's lighting is pretty straightforward. All I have is, again, an overhead area light, which can be found right here. And then I have a fill light over here on the left. I have a fill light over here on the right. And then for this rim light, I have this all the way in the back. And I just chose a bluish type of color for this. Cool. So that's pretty straightforward to create this jumbled mess. At this point, what we'd want to do is create some sort of camera. So I already have these two cameras set up. So all you're going to need to do is create a camera here. And then to look through the camera, you just click this little thing. And now I would just go through and try to find a composition that looks nice. You know, once you get something that's looking pretty cool, all you need to do is save that so you don't accidentally bump it. So if you right-click this camera, go to rigging tags at a protection to it. Now you won't be able to move anymore unless you uncheck this little box in the camera. 4. Spheres: In this video, I want to show you guys the techniques I use for these two images. So in Cinema 4D, I'll just walk you through this project real quick. So I have a whole bunch of spheres. We could turn off this camera. Whole bunch of spheres, some cloners, some other shapes cloned onto the sphere. So I'm just going to walk you through and show you how I did this. So first and foremost, let's let's focus on this one right here. So the first thing I'll do is I'll create a sphere. And I can make this a little bit bigger. Maybe add a few additional segments in here. And then I can create, I'll turn this off real quick. I can create a little cylinder. Just bring that down a little bit. Turn the sphere back on. So now to clone this cylinder onto the sphere, all I'm gonna do is create a cloner. And I want to put the cylinder inside of this cloner. And it were this cloner. Now click this cloner where it says Object and mode. I'm going to choose Object. Now this So give me an object field where I can drop this cylinder into. And you'll notice right away that we have these clones that are attaching right to the cylinder. So going back to this cloner, we could start messing with some of these clones. All right, So where it says distribution, if we go to vertex and two edges, polygon centers, surface volume. So for this one, I think it's, for this particular one I can use poly center or let's say vertex. Now go into my transform. And I'll just rotate this 90 degrees. These are looking a little bit too big, so I'll just take this cylinder and just scale this down. And there we have our first sphere. All right, so I want to show you an additional technique. Now just turn these off. So what if I create a unique shape? Let's go into this pen tool and just create this kind of curvy little shape here. And for this, what I'm going to use is something called a lay the nerves. So if I take the spline, drop it into a lathe nerves, I get this interesting little shape, right? So now I can do the same thing that I did with this sphere. So I'll just duplicate this Command C Command V. So now I have the sphere. Lay this looking way too big in comparison to the sphere. Like a prejudice. Take the sphere and push it up or scale it up or other. And I can take this laden their ABS. And just like we did with the previous cloner, I can drop this inside of a cloner object. And now with this Mode, Object tab mode again, and we'll choose an object, and then I'll drop my sphere into there. And again, I get these little clones on here. Let's go ahead and rotate this minus 90. And now we can mess with this, maybe this, the mode of this cloner objects. I kinda like the way that it looks on the surface. So with the surface, we also have accounts. So we can increase the counts. We can mess with the seed. If this thing is still too big, I can hit T on the keyboard, scale that down, right, That kind of thing. So additionally, I also have these like little tourists shapes right here. I have these spheres that are in our circles. So let me just show you that as well. So for the torus shape, all I did was I'm going to turn this off. I came up here, created a torus, made this a little bit bigger by clicking and dragging these nodes. And I can increase the pipe segments, the pipe, the ring segments just to kinda make it a little bit smoother. Now I'll just come in here, rotate this one, let's say 40 degrees. I'll duplicate this by hitting Command C, command V. Rotate it opposite way. And I'll just grab a few of these cylinders. And I could change the orientation of this, make it a little bit bigger. So let's just say oriented this way. And I can go into one of my side views. Let's move this over to kinda give it like a little little bolt or something or a little connector that makes it look like it has some detail into their duplicate this one over the other side. And that is how I created that shape. Pretty straightforward. We're going to do is go ahead and hit Alton G on the keyboard to group this together, call this tourists. Alright, and I wanted to show you another little tool in here called an array. So if I create a sphere, come up to here, array. Now put the sphere inside my array object. And I can start making this go in a radial fashion. Maybe this sphere is a little bit too big. I can bring that down a little bit. And I can just start taking this array, duplicating that command C, command V. Maybe I bring this up a little bit. Maybe I increase this radius, maybe increase the counts. Duplicate this again. Do the same thing. Increase the count, maybe bring it up a little bit, that kind of thing until I get it looking like I wanted to like, I want it. All right from here. I'm just going to turn on my original geometry. I went ahead and added some lighting. So first and foremost, I added a sky. And the sky, I put on a HDRI image. So you can find your HDR eyes again in the Content Browser if you just choose HTTP or search for HDRI, there's a bunch of them in here that you can use. So I just want that to act to give me some reflections back into these fears. I added a floor object, which you can find right here, that'll create an infinite floor. And then for the lighting, I kept this pretty straightforward. I have a directional light that provides the mate lights, main light source, a few fill lights. I also created these columns that circle the entire space, just for some more additional reflections back into my spheres. And on these columns, I added this compositing tag. And you can find that. And the rendering Tags compositing. And for here I just uncheck seen by camera. So when this renders, the only thing that I see from these columns are the reflections back into these spheres. All right, One of the things I wanted to show you is this visible light, which is pretty cool. So I'll just create a new project and I'll create a light. So right now if I take a render, I just get a black, black screen. But if I take this light source and I go to visible light, and I say visible. Now when I take a render, I'll actually be able to see that light source. So if I go into the lens tab, I can also enable a different type of glow on here. So if I choose candle, it's gonna give me this kinda glow. So now when I render, you can see I'm getting a totally different effect. Alright? And that's exactly what I used in, in this scene. So I just went into here, I added a lens and then I start playing with these parameters, the brightness aspect ratio, until I got it looking like I wanted it to look. And I ended up with this kind of glow when I rendered it out. 5. Color Festival: In this video, what I want to show you guys are the techniques that I use to create these two images. So we'll be covering additional cloners, some random effectors, and the sketch and toon shader and cinema 4D. So in Cinema 4D, just want to show you my scene. So here it is. It looks like a lot of stuff happening in here. So I'll just walk you through the process again and turn off some of these objects. Turn off my background so you can clearly see what's going on here. And I'll start with, Let's start with this one right here. So basically all I'm doing is I took a sweep nerves. I have a circle and an arc spline, which you can find right here. And you can see this is, this is what I started with right here. Put that in a sweep, put that into a cloner. And the cloner is I had a radial design, radial mode. All right. So I want to run through the process of using a random effector. So let's just go ahead and I'll take this sweep Command C command V. I'll turn off this geometry. So for the sweep, I'll create a cloner, drop this inside of that cloner radial. And now what I can do is add a few more of these. Push these out a little bit. And now with this cloner selected, and I'm going to go up to MoGraph Effector and I will choose the random effector. So what this a random effect it does is it starts offsetting these in kind of a random fashion. So if we go to this parameter, you'll see that this position is turned on automatically. So if I uncheck that, you see that they go back to their original position. And what this does is it, basically, if I take this y parameter C, it's going to offset these again randomly. And the y position, we can offset them in the x and the z however we want. Alright, so that's basically how I created that with the cloner and a random effector. Just go through some of these same thing, just using a cloner, Random Effectors to create all of these. And again, I'm just using a simple sweep. You know, like I showed you guys in the first video. Go through here. One of the main things that I wanted to show you was this sketch and toon shader and creating some of these textures. Another additional thing that I wanted to show you, let me show you these spheres. So I'll just turn this stuff off to get a lot of this random type of sphere going on. All I'm doing is this. I create a sphere. Maybe create multiple spheres because we're going to texture them different colors. So if I take this command C Command V, Command C Command V, and then I can just drop it different colors on here. And I'll show you guys what I did with these textures to make these. And I'll take all these fears and I'll drop them inside of a MoGraph Cloner. So all four of these, I use the grid array. Kinda push this up, add some more of these into here. And I want this cloner selected. All I have to do is go back up to MoGraph cloner. And again, I'll choose a random cloner that's going to start offsetting these things in the position. So I could start playing with these parameters. And additionally, I can also do the scale. So let's do a minus one scale. So the minus1 scale is just going to randomly scale these down, right? So now we get a whole bunch of detail with these fears. All right, so as far as texture and goes, the way that I created these was if I created, if I create a new texture by double-clicking here, double-click this, turn off the color channel, turn off the reflectance, going to luminance. And I'll just go through, through here, pick a color. I could take this command C Command V to duplicate it, name it whatever color you want, whenever blue. And then I could choose a different color for this luminance. Right? So that's how I created all of these for this gradient. I'll show you that as well. So if I take this command C command V, duplicate that, just call this gradient. And for here, I'll go into this texture and just choose a gradient. Now I can go into here, select a color for this. Let's say red, whatever color you want. I can hold down Command on the keyboard to duplicate this, drag it over. So now I can change the color of this one to let say green. Click command again. Maybe change this to a yellow or orange command. Click again, change that to a different color. And Nazi get these a little bit sharper. When I'm going to do is I'm going to command click and put these really close together. I'll duplicate this orange one. Put that close to this. Maybe I can create another one that's just white. So now we get this like stripy look in gradient. And that's what I placed on the biggest forms that I have in my scene. These big sweep objects right here. So again, it's just a sweep, a spline and a circle placed inside of a cloner. And then I place this gradients onto the sweep. And I just used uvw mapping on that. And that's how it mapped all these gradient it great aiding colors onto this big sweep. Alright, so to get a Sketch and Toon material in here, what you're going to need to do is go into the render settings. And as you can see, I already have this Sketch and Toon in here. But if it's not in here yet and go to Effect, Sketch and Toon. And typically what I do for this is I'll leave these defaults for the main ally in the render and for the shading, I'll just go to custom color. I'll choose this white. There we go. And now for the Sketch and Toon material, all I did was I went into the Adjustment tab. And right here where it says scale, that gives me 1, 0, 3 and 0, 3. And then for this overshoot, I put 3, 3%. So that's going to give me these offset lines and lines that look like they're sketchy. These overshot lines, lines that are thicker and go into thinner. So that's kinda the effect that I'm going after with this. All right, and I'll show you how to render all this stuff out in a later video. 6. Rendering: Now I want to show you guys how to render these things out. So the very first thing that I like to do is create object buffers on all of my pieces of geometry that I'll need to create a really nice selections within photoshop. And so I'll right-click on this piece of geometry. And I'll add a compositing tag, and I'll just duplicate this compositing tag it by command clicking on a Mac. And then I go through on this first one, I'll go to Object Buffer, assign Object Buffer 1, 2, 3, and then 4. And additionally in the background, I want to add some, some additional object buffers to my low poly landscape and to my telephone poles. So again, I'll Command click these. So this is going to be object buffer five, and this will be object buffer six. Okay? So now we go into the render settings and I'm going to enable a multi-pass. And then I have to come down to this multi-pass tab and add image layers. That's gonna give me everything, the ambient, the shadows, specular, all the stuff. So now we need it six object buffers as well. So I'll go to Object Buffer, not add 1, 2, and I'll add six of these. So now here what we wanna do is we want to make sure that the object buffer group ID corresponds to the object buffer number here. So let's say object buffer one. We'll change this one to 23456. Okay? So now we want to select our output. And for these I did 4500 pixel width. You could do whatever you want for yours. They wanted to go to our save, enable save. And down here where it says multi-pass. Let's go ahead and selected a location for this type in a name, hit Save. And now all we need to do is come over here, hit this render button. And that's going to go through render out this multi-pass image. Just let that run for a second. Once this is done rendering, I'm going to go back into my render settings and I can disable the multi-pass. Everybody have this render is cell render in here. But if you don't see the cell renderer, first go to Effect add cell render. I'm just going to leave this outline checked. Now go to Output. And again, just specify a safe path. I'll just call this cell, and then I'll go to my Render. Next thing I'm going to go back to sell render, disable outline enable edges. Go back to my save, name, this edges. And again rendered to the picture viewer. And this is gonna give me all the edges of all my geometry. 7. Post Production: So now we're gonna get into some post-production. First thing we're gonna do is we're going to open up our multi-pass file, our cell render, and our edges inside of Photoshop. So one of the, one of the things I like to do is turn off all my multi-pass layers and just go through and see which ones I need and which ones I don't. So these seem to be empty, so I will just delete those. Reflection. Refraction is empty and I think the rest of these are empty as well. So I'll just go ahead and delete those. Another thing that I want to do is I want to cut out this black background. So I'm gonna take this diffuse, double-click it, rename it diffuse. I'll take all four of these command G on the keyboard and just name this multi-pass. And now I'm going to go into my diffuse, create a layer mask on this, and go to my channels. And now you'll notice that I have all these different channels that I can use to make my selections on this image. And that was, that was created through the object buffers. So if I Command click on a Mac, and then I'll command shift, click on the next channel. Again, Command shift click all of these. That's going to select all my geometry. Now, I just want to cut out this black background. So what I'm gonna do is go select Inverse. I'll hit B on the keyboard for a brush. So after we mask it out, we're still not seeing that background. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to create a new layer. Drop that on the bottom. Call this background. And I will just fill that with white. And so I hit G on the keyboard for this paint bucket tool, make sure my foreground color was white and just fill that in. I rented this out a little bit smaller for this tutorial. So you can see there's a bunch of these jagged lines. If that's happening to you, you can go back in here and just go ahead and paint on the mask with white. And you could see that'll get rid of those jag it outlines over here. When, when you have a higher resolution render like the original on this one I did at like 4500. This would I rent it out a little bit smaller just for the sake of this tutorial. But yeah, if you're getting these white, white lines around everything, all you need to go, all you need to do is go back into that mask, paint with white. And that'll get rid of all those lines. Cool. They seem to be pretty bad here. But yeah, pretty easy to fix. So once I have that background knocked out, what I'm gonna do is go ahead and add some sort of background image to this. So I'm just going to use this panel that I shot years ago. So I'll just Command a to select everything, and then I'll just click and drag into my image. And that's gonna give me this in the background. Obviously this is enormous. So I'm going to skip, need to scale this down a little bit. That's just gonna give me a little city in the background, a bump that down and get some clouds in there. There we go. That's the start of this point. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to create, I'm going to start using this cell renders that I created. So I'll Command a on the keyboard. To select everything. And then I'll hold down shift and click and drag over my multi-pass image and just let that go. I drag this to the top of the layer stack, call this cell. And I can zoom in here. I could put this on a multiply blend mode. And what that's doing, it's given me a little bit of an outline for these. I can even take this, duplicate that one more time. And that's going to accentuate that outline. All right, so I can close the cell now. Let's go to my edges. A man again Command a on the keyboard. If you're on a Mac, I'll shift, click and drag it to this tab and then let go. And then I'll rename this edges. I'll put this on a multiply blend mode, and then I'll just take this opacity way down. Alright, so I want to have all the background of this as a black and white. So I'm going to go ahead and create a new hue saturation layer. I can just take that saturation all the way down. You can also use other ones. There's a black and white filter right here, and that's probably a better one to use. Let me use that one. So with this black and white filter, you can actually control the whites, the, or the yellows, the reds, greens, and cyan. To get a little bit more custom look. To refine this a little bit more however you like. Let's play with those sliders. I want all the color back in into my forms. So I'll go into this black and white mask, and I'll Command click my forms. And I can go back into my mask. And then I could just paint with black on here, and that's going to reveal my color. All right, so now I can just continue going through and start tweaking this however you see fit. Right. I'll I'll walk you through the process of what I did on mine. So here's all my layers. Let me just pull this up for you. And I'll go through all of this one by one. So here's my background. Is that actually rendered out this landscape and these telephone poles separately to have a little bit more control over it. And then I added a channel mixer for my black and white on this one. But my shadows over top of this cell render. Then I also added these little exploding elements, and that's pretty easy to do. I'll go back in here and I'll show you how to do that. So if I take this image, Command a, and then I go command shift C on the keyboard and then Command V. What that does is it takes the entire image and it copies it to a layer up above. So what I can do here is I can cut out some of this stuff very easily. So I'll create a layer mask on this. And let's say, let's say I just want these like white little curvy things. I'll select that mask. I'll go up to Select Inverse. And then I'll paint away everything else. And it's hard to see here because all the layers below it are still on. And so just paint that away. The select. And I can just get rid of all this color as well on this image. So if I go to adjustment the saturate, and then I can go to Layer, Layer Mask, Apply. And now if I turn all this stuff back on, I can take these exploded segments, put them on the layer, on the bottom of the layer stack, start moving that stuff around. And it gives me just a whole bunch of extra detail and my image. So I can take this, put it on different blend modes, like a color dodge, Right? Take that, push it up here. Player onto the layer stack. It almost looks like we were getting some free reflections in our, in our form here. So I'm just duplicating this plan around until again, till it looks cool. All right, so I'll go back to here. So you can see I just duplicated a bunch of those. Put them behind my form. Add a little bit, a little bit of glow. And that's pretty easy to do. Let me show you how to do that as well. So if I create a new layer, and let's say up here, and I can just name this glow. I just choose a white color for the time being and make my brush really big and soft. And I can just go ahead and paint in some white here. Changes to I don't know. We can play around and we'll leave it on overlay for right now. And then I'll go in here and I'll just mask out the form because I want this globe to be happening behind here, right? Something like that. Just gives it a little bit more detail. And then you could just keep going with this, playing around with different stuff. You can create a curves adjustment layer. You know, add some more darks in here. Bump up the lights, maybe that's too much dark. Bump up the light, bump up the contrast a little bit. We could create another, another layer that's hue saturation. Maybe my color wants to be more saturated and that's probably way too much. So if we click this eyeball on and off, you can see how much we're saturating that form. And maybe we want some sort of vignette on the outside. So I create a new layer, fill it with, I don't know. I'll usually pick something in here like a dark dark blue or something. Kinda push the saturation back, fill that layer, put it on the multiply blend mode, add a layer mask. And I can just go up to this elliptical marquee. Add a little bit of this, Select Modify Feather. Let's feather at a 150 pixels and then I'll paint with black on my mask. That's going to give me a little vignette on the sides. And if it's too much, you can always bring down the opacity. And then you can just keep playing around until you get this thing looking exactly like you want it. All right. So what else did I do here? I added some glows to some of these forms. Let me show you that. So I just went through painted with white. It's on an overlay blend mode just to kinda accentuate some of these forms. Here's an additional glow over top of everything. Added a little bit of yellow highlights to some of these. Some white highlights. So pretty straightforward stuff. I'm just going through selecting my channel, picking a color, painting on it, and then changing the blend mode to overlay. Then I have my sell, my edges. Here's my Curves, hue and saturation, just like I showed you in the previous step. And then I added a little bit of green on here. You know, you could do that with any kind of paper texture or whatever. I think I added the grain on here with noise. So what I did was I created a new layer, filled it with, let's say black. And then I went up to Filter Noise, Add Noise, Gausian monochromatic. And then what we can do is come in here. I wouldn't, I use here, I used an overlay blend mode. Overlay. That's way too dark. So we're going to use Soft Light, bring that back a little bit. And what that's gonna do is just add a little bit of grain to your image, right? And you can mess around with some of these blend modes to find one that you think works better. But that's basically what I did to create these abstract pieces of art. So I hope that helps. And now we're going to jump into some of the other aspects of getting into crypto art. So join me in the next lessons. 8. Resources: In this video, I want to discuss resources for learning about the crypto art space. Learning about cryptocurrency and discussing some of the top artists and some of the some of the online platforms that you can use to sell your crypto art. So this is a really good place to start. It's a, it's a podcast by School of Motion. And they interview the artists, people who was one of the leading crypto artists in the space right now. So I would definitely recommend checking out this podcast. It's about two hours long and they go through all kinds of different stuff from how we got started in the space to his every day is that he's been doing for 14 years. And, you know, they discuss and they discuss LFTs, how they're created and what they are, that kind of thing. So this is definitely worth checking out. It's about two hours in length. It'll definitely inspire you to get into the space. And below this there is a ton of resources from different artists. You know, people among all these other people that you want to check out. Some are graffiti artists, some are traditional painters like Jackson Pollock. So go through these. There's other resources on here as well that have nothing to do with crypto art, but you definitely want to check out this link on Slayer and start listening to them. Additionally, there's peoples and FT collection. There's resources for all these different online curated galleries like nifty makerspace known origin. So I would go through all of these, follow the, follow some of these Instagram profiles, facebook profiles, and just start getting familiar with what's happening in this space. You definitely want to go through and follow some of these artists that are on here as well. So again, this podcast is really good and really in depth, and it'll definitely inspired you get, inspire you to get into the space. Another good at podcasts that I've found, It's called curating crypto, and this is available through Apple podcasts. They also have a website with different episodes. I'll provide a link for you as well for this. An additional resource for learning about different types of art is through known origin. They have this collections section on their website and they walk through all the different categories and categories and genres of crypto art and art in general. So this is a great resource for just learning about different styles of art, um, and what people are doing. You can click on these and see what's being uploaded to this website as far as that specific style is concerned. So yeah, this is a great website as well known origin dot io, backslash, backslash collections. And additionally, before you get started in the art space, I think it's a really good idea just to get a, some sort of understanding of what cryptocurrency is, how it's created, how wall its work, what they are, how to create them, that kind of thing. So there's a few courses that I found on Linda. It's all also called LinkedIn learn. The first one is called Learning Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. And this specific training will take you through what bitcoin is, how it works, all that kinda stuff, how to create a wallet. Other cryptocurrencies. So this is a really in-depth course that you could take to just start learning about cryptocurrency in general. And there's another one on it. Linda, again, LinkedIn learn called cryptocurrency foundations. And this guy also talks about the birth of Bitcoin and where it came from, how it's produced, all this other stuff that mining process, et cetera. So those are two really good courses. If you don't have access to LinkedIn learn. One thing I would suggest is possibly go into your local library and getting a library card that I have access through this just simply by having a library card in my area. So that could be a way that you can access these courses for free. Additionally, if you're a member of Skillshare, I typed in a search cryptocurrency and a bunch of stuff comes up over here. Cryptocurrency crash course for beginners. So you just want to go through and check out some of these foundation courses to just familiarize yourself what this is. And lastly, a, I also did a search on Udemy.com for cryptocurrency. And there's a ton of resources that are here as well. So as far as, as far as getting into the crypto art space, I think it's really important to gain a solid understanding of what all this stuff is, what an FT NFT is, what cryptocurrency is, how it's made, all that stuff. So go through and check out a lot of these resources. It'll definitely help you get into it. It'll help you gain a solid understanding of what the space is, what it entails, and that kind of stuff. Let's move on to the next chapter. 9. Risks: Welcome to the chapter on some of the risks that you can encounter when getting into the crypto art space. The very first thing that I want to discuss are the fee structures. It's really expensive to get into this space. All right, so you're going to have a fee, a fee, and another fee to mint your very first NFT. So first and foremost, when you're buying a theorem, Here's a transaction for seventy-five dollars of Ethereum. And in addition to that seventy-five dollars, I was also charged $8.20 just the purchase the theorem. Okay. And before creating the NFT, we'll get into how to do it in a later chapter. There's a website called gas now. So before I created my first NFT, I went on this website and it checked out what the fee structure was at that given time for this gas fee. So for slow, we had $2.39 and for a rapid upload we had $3 and 35 cents. Okay. So that was kind of where I was gauging what the fee structure was going to be for creating my first, first piece of NFT artwork. So when I got into creating it and I was using wearable, the website to create my first NFT. So the very first gas V, came out to $5.76. Okay. Which is way different from the gas now, fees that I was looking at. It's probably double from what this was. All right. So so that was the first, first V. And then additionally, surprise, surprise. A lot of websites that you go on and YouTube links don't even mention an additional fee on top of this called a minting fee. So I had up to this $0.828 for the theorem, fi, $5.76 for the gas v. And then fermenting. It also costs $41.49. And that is that was just at that particular time. So these fees go up and down and they fluctuate by the second, by the minute. So you could, you could expect this minting fee to be as high as 50, 80, a $100. It fluctuate, so it's something to look out for it. And I don't even know how you figure out what this V is going to be before you go ahead and create your first NFT. So total for my first upload, it was $55.53 to meet my first NFT on rarer will. Alright, another issue I wanted to discuss that you could potentially encounter when uploading your crypto art to some of these sites is missing artwork. So you go through, you pay all the fees, you apply, the upload your work. And all of a sudden there's no artwork on your profile. So first and foremost, the thing that I want to tell you is to be patient. It doesn't happen within a few seconds. It could take ten minutes, 15 minutes, half-hour. It actually took mine a few hours. The first one that I meant it through wearable to go through. So if this happens to you and your unbearable and again, it will get into how to create the first NFT, your first NFT through wearable and in a later chapter. But if this happens to you, your artwork is missing. One thing that I could suggest is go up to here where there's this lightning bolt on your wearable profile. Click that and then see all, and that should show you your upload. Okay, so just be aware that people have had their artwork missing. They haven't been able to find it. And there's a great thread that's through referable. It's called Dude, Where's my art? And there's 74 replies. And if you read through this, I highly suggest you read through this before you upload anything. You know, there's a ton of people on here that have had the similar issue. They pay the gas fees, the minting fee, the fee to purchase, the theory I'm first and foremost. And then when they go ahead and create their first artwork, nothing happens out those fees and they're having a hard time locating their artwork. So please go through, read this thread. It's really good. There's people on here that offers suggestions of how you can figure out where your artwork is. Other people that are pretty upset. So it's a good resource to go through and just read about before you get into this space. The next thing that I wanted to discuss with you guys are failed to transactions. Okay. So sometimes transactions fail for whatever reason. I can't explain why, but I want to share a story with you guys on my very first experience with trying to create a transaction. All right. In my haste to get into this crypto art space, I didn't do my homework at first. So that's why I definitely recommend on the previous chapter where I give you resources. Please go through those, please learn what cryptocurrency is, what wallets are before you jump into this space. So my very first experience with creating a transaction was through nifty gateway. And before I even understood that they were a curated website, meaning you have to submit an artist's profile, get accepted into their website and then you'll be able to sell artwork. I was under the impression that it's just like any other website. You sign up, you upload some artwork and you start selling, but that's really not the way it goes. Here's the process. First, you have to find a website that allows you to create an NFT such as wearable. Once you create it unbearable, you don't have to put it on sale on wearable. What you could do is create the NFT, send it to your wallet, like a MetaMask wallet. Once it's in your wallet, then you'll have the ability to transfer it over to a curated website such as nifty gateway or super rare, et cetera. Anyway. So failed transactions, that's what I wanted to talk to you about in this in this section. So what I did was I purchased some theory, um, and I sent it over to a wallet that I thought was the correct way to do it on a nifty gateway. And a few minutes later I get this email. It says your deposit on nifty Gateway has failed to process. So after a few days, I didn't hear back from them. And I sent them an email. So we sent e-mails back and forth for a week or something and, you know, we didn't resolve the issue. So I figured okay, well, maybe it's something with MetaMask because I was using the MetaMask plug-in for Chrome. So I sent a MetaMask and email and again, We're back and forth for about a week. And the final conclusion, my failed transaction was, I see it's a successful transaction. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do to revert it due to the immutable nature of the blockchain. So what does that mean? That means that money is lost. So I just wanna make you aware of that. And that was completely my fault because I sense they transaction to the wrong type of wallet with the wrong type of, you know, NFT, right? I actually sent a theorem to where I should have been sending FFTs, which is pretty confusing. But don't make that same mistake because you can end up losing your money. One thing, like in the real-world, if a transaction fails, you can go to your bank. You could talk to somebody. You can call your bank's customer service representative. They can walk you through the process. But remember, with crypto, we're dealing with a decentralized finance and currency, right? So if a transaction fails, there really isn't anybody that you can call. And basically what happens is your money is gone, okay? So do your homework, understand wallets before you start making any transactions. So lastly, in this chapter I wanted to discuss beginning artists verse top artists. A resource you can use to check out some of the top artists that are selling in the NFC space. Nifti Gateway. And if you go to the stats button, this will show you some of the top artists, their gross sales, average, average resale and that kind of thing. I'm sure this will be enough to inspire you to get into the space. One of the things that I suggest is going through and check out some of these other artists, like people, 1.8 million followers, peter Tarika, 2.225 thousand followers. This is all an Instagram check out. Some of these other guys work in their followers. So basically what I'm trying to tell you is the top artists are going to have a lot more Pool and be able to get into these websites, especially the curated websites like nifty and super rare. And they're going to have a lot easier time selling some of their work. So for beginning artists, you know, it's going to take that first and foremost getting into these curated websites. And I'm not really sure how easy it is to sell work on there. So it's just something to consider. If you're beginning artists and you want to get into the space, will you be able to get onto these curated websites? And will you have any success with selling your work? So just something to think about before you jump in. 10. Submissions: So if you made it this far and you're still interested in continuing on to become a crypto artist and sell your work online. I wanted to discuss admissions and how to get accepted into some of these curated galleries. Before that. First thing you're going to need to decide is which websites you want to submit to. So there's nifti gateway, super rare known origin. There's makers place referable and it opens C and nifty gateway, super rare, unknown origin. Those are all Curie curated websites. So before you go ahead and submit your profile, I just want to walk through a list, a checklist of things that you're going to need. So first, the first and foremost, you're going to need a video of yourself talking about your artwork, the themes, the process, that kind of thing. So try to keep them in the video to about one minute in length. Secondly, you're going to need samples of your artwork. Okay, once you have your video and your artwork and place, you should go ahead and upload those to Google Drive. And you wanna make sure in Google Drive that they are public and can be viewed without signing in. Okay. You're also going to need a biography about yourself and your work. And you're going to need social links. So any social media, your website and that kinda thing. So Instagram, Facebook. So once you're ready to submit to these websites, I'm all you have to do is come up to nifty gateway. And it all the way at the bottom, it says create a nifty with us. And this will take you to an Apply Now button. And all you need to do is go through here and start filling this stuff out. And it's going to ask you for all those things that I just mentioned, your video, your artwork, biography, and all that stuff, social links. So on super aware, you're just going to come all the way to the bottom, submit artists profile. And again, you're just going to go through this process and it'll walk you through the process as well. So go ahead, upload all this stuff, fill in the correct information, and then submit. So as far as the response time on some of these websites, they are extremely busy with artists submitting their work. So as far as a timeframe that you can expect to hear back from them, I don't think it's going to be any immediate response. Some of these websites are reviewing portfolios for next year. So it could be awhile before you hear back from any of these websites. So I just wanted to give you a heads up on that. 11. NFT Creation: Now I want to walk you through the process of creating your first NFT. So the very first thing you're going to need to do is go to MetaMask dot io and download MetaMask and install the extension for Chrome web browser. Okay, once you do that, you can go into your Meta mask and you can hit by. And it'll ask you to continue to wire. So when you continue to wire, you can type in an amount and it'll tell you right here the transaction fee and the network fee. So for seventy-five dollars, you'll be paying 8459 or somewhere in that range. It varies from minute-to-minute, day-to-day. Alright? So once you have some a theorem in your MetaMask wallet, what you're gonna wanna do is come over to referable.com. And then you're going to connect your wallet. Then you'll choose MetaMask, type in your password and it will connect. So it creates, you're going to want to select single or multiple. Single is for one of a kind additions, multiples if you want to take one image and sell it multiple times. Okay, so for here, let's create a single image. Go ahead and choose my file. So I'll choose this file. And then we can go ahead and put on sale. So where it says instance sale price, you could figure out what the amount of a theorem is. So if you put in 0.5 ethereum, that's going to be $770. It's going to be up to you what you want to sell this for. So right here you type in the percentage of the thorium and it'll give you the translation down here for what it's actually costing in US dollars. Okay, you can leave this on referable. Go ahead and name this. And then you can add a description for your work. The amount of royalties you want this as if it resells. How many how many royalties you'll get on the resale of that. And then properties. You can think about these like, kinda like tags. So they can put in all kinds of different properties. And then you can go ahead and create item. So this could take a few minutes to go through. You'll have to go through confirm the gas fee, start minting the token, confirm that V, and then sign. Once you're done creating your art, you can come up to this little lightning bolt. See all, and then you'll see your artwork show up in here. You can click on it. Once you click on it down in the bottom right-hand corner, you'll see a little button that says put up for sale. So you'll want to click that, enter the amount and put it up for sale. Be patient with this. With this process, it could take more than a few minutes. Mind take a few hours to become available on wearable. 12. Conclusion: I wanted to thank you again for taking this course. I hope this series of lessons helped you understand the process of creating your digital art, the risks and the potential rewards for getting into the crypto art space. I wish you all the best of luck with your work and your creative endeavors. Bye for now.