Great News for 3D Artists: Interactive NFT Platform Has Launched

Drawing a graphic painting and selling it as an NFT is exciting, but probably not as fun as creating a 3D NFT art piece that allows you to interact and add gaming and sound features.

Blockchain isn’t only revolutionizing the financial and business sectors; it’s also beginning to make a real impact on the art industry. Original digital art pieces, even GIFs, are now being sold for millions, and they are owned only in the virtual world as digital tokens.

There are now new solutions that help create even more entertaining NFTs. The idea for the NFT Studio, which would produce interactive NFTs, came in March 2021, when the founder of the platform started coding, programming, building a website, and finding a colleague. In August, the platform reached a point where it could be shown to the world.

In October, the platform will be released officially and enable anybody to mint 3D NFTs themselves.

Lukas Merville is a Canadian based in Poland with a background in literature, art history, and philosophy, and has been working as an NFT appraiser.

He researches NFT artists for curators and carries out aesthetic and market analysis, providing information for curators so they can decide which pieces to purchase.

In an exclusive interview with DailyCoin, the creator told us about his exciting project that will soon be launched:

“With this NFT project, I’m able to connect my background in arts with blockchain technology. I started the project alone but found an excellent developer, and we’re working together to build the platform. We are trying to grow the team because it’s small, and the project is getting a lot of interest,”

Merville said.

The Need for Advancement

Merville noticed the frustration of digital 3D artists. Creators who work with powerful tools like Blender and Cinema 4D often say they are limited because platforms like Ethereum or Solana cannot handle the size of the files they work with.

Artists have to export their images into video, so some of the detailed 3D NFTs are just looped videos. The technology needs to push the limitations of what NFTs can be and what we can mint. The NFT studio project uses the Internet Computer blockchain and allows people to mint interactive 3D NFTs. If digital 3D artist projects are in graphic software, the public will get the same artwork in NFT.

“People can upload files on the platform. The NFT is in your wallet, you can transfer or sell it. We’re not artists -- we are developers trying to build a nice engine, with examples of what is possible. You can turn images around, there are interactions, sounds, and these 3D objects have all the NFT features. With Ethereum, for example, there’s just an image, jpeg, or mp4. But here, we can mint the 3D objects, interact with them, and even play games. We discovered last weekend that we could also mint games as interactive experiences. That opens doors to a lot of possibilities,”

Merville says.

Merville began working and building bridges with the Algorand crypto platform and Arweave storage. The project received a grant from the Dfinity Foundation, which immediately saw the project’s value.

NFT Studio works on the Dfinity platform — the only one that enables web assembly in the browser — a requirement for 3D NFTs. Other platforms haven’t reached this point, so currently it will be the only platform that enables users to make interactive NFTs.

“At first, 3D NFTs sounded like fiction — how would that be possible with the current state of technology? But we did it thanks to Dfinity. With their grant, we were able to finance the development, and we have the minting engine.”

How Much Will It Cost to Make NFTs on the Internet Computer?

NFT Studio has built two tools — one 3D voxel engine and a pixel engine. Minting can be difficult, slow, and expensive. To solve this problem, the process needs to be fun, rewarding, and cheap, as no one wants to pay $10-$20 to make an NFT when there’s a possibility that the token you are paying to produce will not be sold. So it has to be very cheap and innovative so that creators want to show it to other people and inspire them to create their own NFTs.

"It should cost less than a dollar to make an NFT on the ICP. With Solana, it's a few cents. We don't want it to be expensive like Ethereum, but can it be as cheap as Solana? We have to work out a fee system, but it cannot be free, because every time the user mints an NFT, resources like storage are needed. We’re working on our fee system, but it will be less than a dollar to mint an NFT.

In terms of platforms, I don't have a preference, but I think Dfinity solves the cost, speed, and technology problem.”

NFT Studio’s Partnerships

The project initiators want to take the project further and make it easily accessible and simple to use for anyone, and attract digital artists:

“I mentioned Blender and Cinema 4D — these are companies we want to approach if our platform can be in their software as a plugin. That would bring a lot of 3D artists who are not involved in the NFT sector. We want to add a gaming tool as well because we can mint games as NFTs, as well as tokenize in-game items in 3D. The existing games can issue special 3D items that people could have in their wallets. We want many different applications to benefit from the minting engine,”

Merville told DailyCoin.

On The Flipside

The project seems very promising, but it’s still in the initial phase.
NFT platforms that run on Solana blockchain are still the cheapest for NFT creation, though they lack some features.
As with cryptocurrencies, there are some concerns about the environmental impact of NFT minting.