thank you everyone 💌🃏
this collection has been some of the most fun i’ve ever had making physical and digital art. hope you enjoy all the cards will start printing and shipping them soon
I tried to make this image to explain how Horses?7 was generated.
The tail end of working on Drilady I started using cursor to help me code hashlips. I have no experience coding so what I could actually do in hashlips had been very limited up until that point.
The next couple of projects I did used cursor to be able program increasingly more sophisticated hashlips outputs. Horse?7 is basically the peak in complexity and re-shifted how I think about hashlips as a tool. Previously I had just viewed it as a compiler tool, not really where the art took place, but as a way to organize the art. But as I've used it more and more I now understand it as a kind of system that I've developed my own language within, and see it as equally important as asset creation. I think my approach to hashlips is something that makes this collection very distinct.
Before cursor all of the assets had to be designed around fixed z axis positions, which created a lot of limitations, and this often meant I'd have to run separate layer configurations for specific assets. Example: traits like Drilady's "asian GF", or "full metal bunny" can't interact with a lot of other traits I had designed in the collection so they were run in their own designated layer configurations. This is why in the final output you see all of those traits lumped together (I forgot to scramble them post output).
But now I don't need to worry about having fixed z axis layers because it can all be programed to be shifted at any point. I also created a series of top linking traits that are paired with other traits in the collection. Sometimes the linking is setup to only happen a portion of the time, sometimes the traits always link. An example of this is any image where the bottom part of the horse's legs are covered. There's instances where the horse is walking in water or a field of flowers and in those cases the linking traits are designed to make it look like the horse's legs are submerged in that landscape and this way I didn't have to create separate horse leg assets for those scenarios.
As with all the other collections I've made I'm always trying to reach the most variety as possible from image to image, and this was always done with the multiple different layer configurations. Now the whole thing is just baked into one and/or tree system that has different paths at each stage depending on whats been picked. I gradually built this system over a couple of months and the end result is basically nested NFTs within nested NFTs ad infinitum. At the end the system had so many layers and rules built into it that were specific to every asset that it became indecipherable as to what I had actually done. The only way to verify that it was actually working was just to look at and say "ok this looks correct". And this is why there was the delay with the mint, one small part of that whole system broke, and because there was much shit trenched on top of that I had to do a bunch of work to even understand what was going on.
I put in a bid and forgot about it, and someone dumped this, and I didn't even know I won it.
WTF??? Why did you dump this? What a honking masterpiece. It even has my favorite background in the collection.