Public Domain
Vinny & Frens is an NFT collection created by Risk Averse Technology Company (R.A.T.C) with artwork by Stacys. Modeled after the 1926 book Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A.Milne. Vinny is Winnie's long lost cousin and web3 spin off.
The Journey
After Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain January 1st 2022. The VAF team collaborated on different designs and launched the Vinny & Frens collection.
This started with severeal designs in different style types shown here.
Later in 2022 the team worked on writing a full story for Vinny & Frens. This is published and can be seen on Amazon here. Additionally there is an AI written book about Vinny & Frens and companion publishing of the original Winnie-the-Pooh book on Amazon.
The Traits
For generative projects like Vinny & Frens, the core of the artwork is the traits. After all, the traits that are randomly generated create the final piece you see as your NFT. The rareness of certain traits are really what makes them valuable. The number of traits varies quite a bit by project, so for some perspective on trait count let's consider some of the most well known projects. BAYC has 171 traits, Cool Cats has 260, SupDucks has 219 and Doodles has 268 total traits.
What about Vinny & Frens?
Vinny & Frens has some traits that are shared between the characters like the rare backgrounds even though the colors differ by character. Other traits like VR goggles are also shared between the characters despite the art being unique to each character. Therefore there are a couple ways to interpret the number of traits for Vinny & Frens. If you consider every trait as purely distinct you have a total of 458 traits! If you filter on uniquely named traits, Vinny & Frens has 383 traits. If you filter on purely unique traits you still have over 300 traits! Wow, that sure is a lot of traits!
What 'sort' of traits will you find in Vinny & Frens?
Well, given our Winnie-the-Pooh heritage you can expect a fair number of homage references to the classic book.📘🐻 You can also expect many crypto-themed traits and also many just random 'fun' traits.
What are the high level trait categories?
Vinny & Frens have the following nine trait categories:
- Base Character
Background Facial Expression Lower Half Upper Half Footwear Head Hand Item Dresses (female characters)
Below are all the characters:
Winnie-the-Pooh as Vinny the Blockchain Bear 🐻
Christopher Robin as Bernadette Bluebird 👧
Piglet as Hoggy 🐷
Rabbit as Hoppy 🐰
Eeyore as Igor 🦌
Owl as Dr. Hoot 🦉
Kanga & Roo as Walla & B 🦘
The Technology
Vinny & Frens Generation
The process of art generation requires specialized software and without a doubt a major resource for code and education are the wonderfully clear videos produced by @Hashlipsnft.
Vinny & Frens Dapp
Since the dapp represents the 'customer experience' aspect of a NFT project, we wanted to ensure we had the most robust option for Vinny & Frens. We think we found that in @rainbowdotme.
Vinny & Frens Data
We did not want to undermine the magic of minting for everyone and found a great solution in the NFT safe metadata software provided by the dev @marcolipparini. Using Digital Ocean as a host you can rest assured that Vinny & Frens is sniper proof. It is important to keep in mind that we prefer the decentralized nature of storing our art and data on IPFS using a service like @pinatacloud. However, given the sniper risk, we will not switch from Digital Ocean to IPFS until we have minted out.
Vinny & Frens Smart Contract
The ❤️ of a NFT project is undoubtedly the smart contract.
The NFT space moves incredibly quickly, and this includes advancements in smart contracts. It became apparent that the ERC721A developed by the @AzukiOfficial team was best-in-class. Using the base ERC721A with some additional refinements from 0xzoom Vinny & Frens offers users a super low gas minting experience. For the AL we used the Merkle Proof method which keeps the AL off-chain reducing gas even further. Finally we received great audit support from @NftDoyler to give us peace of mind that we were on track and would not encounter last minute issues that might delay our public mint. Bottom line, 'it takes a village" of talented and helpful people to get a NFT project to the finish line and we are incredibly grateful to every single person that has helped Vinny & Frens along the way. ❤️🐻
