How we made Pawn Bots
A behind-the-scenes look into how the bots came to be
Who are we?
We are Hifi.Finance. The team behind the Hifi DeFi lending platform and Pawn Bots. We launched our fixed rate lending platform in February of 2021 with the goal of giving users the ability to borrow against their crypto without surprises. We are DeFi veterans who believe in bringing the power of DeFi to NFTs. Pawn Bots is pioneering NFT lending.
We are also tech veterans who have used and admired a myriad of devices. For our collection, we wanted to pay homage to many of the iconic devices from previous generations that helped shape the world we live in today. Devices that helped us learn, have fun, consume, and create.
Why Bots
Early in the project in our search for inspiration, we looked within our lending protocol. We found that inspiration in Hifi’s liquidation bots. The idea of these bots being able to come to life was a concept we had to see through.
How did Pawn Bots take shape?
One of the goals for the bots was to make them expressive, fun, and high quality. Art that, regardless of the utility, you would be proud to have in your collection and would make you happy when you look at it. The bots went through various iterations that were great, but when we landed on drawing inspiration from retro devices is when we really knew we had found what we wanted to bring to life. Early on in the process, as the project was taking shape, it was internally called Bot Farm Frens.
We even toyed around with some great but less retro device-inspired bot designs.
From there we set our vision for NFT lending and Pawn Bots really started taking shape. With the idea of a pawn shop full of devices from yesteryear waiting for a renewed life and a sense of purpose.
Our original Pawn Bot design (see above), was created by our lead artist Nathan Madsen who created an updated version of a retro computer. This bot defined the framework with which we would go on to develop all of our 15 other bot designs.
What went into the designs
The iteration process of getting the bots just right took into account the following:
- Which designs would resonate?
- Which products do people still feel nostalgic about?
- Which accessories would work with the entire collection?
A lot of heavy lifting went into completing the bots’ 3D designs. The total design process has played out over 9 months. Each bot design was done in Blender where an initial .obj file version was created. This initial design process would take around 3 hours.
From there each bot was subject to feedback from the team where small and large changes were discussed and then implemented. We went back and forth over which bots were worth building and the iteration process of getting the bots just right. For example checkout a couple of our iterations that didn’t make the cut.
The deliberation process was a labor of love. Several accessories were implemented, tested, and many didn’t make the cut. A few examples are sunglasses, halos, earmuffs, lightbulbs, headbands, and bows.
Full rendering time for the collection took 130 hours using dual Nvidia GTX3080 FE video cards. During this process, the .obj files are turned into lovey .jpg files. The best part is we did 3 full renders of the collection to dial everything in. For those counting that’s almost 400 hours of rendering. Once the collection is rendered we take the files and upload them to IPFS to host the images.
How to get involved
We are incredibly proud of what we are building to share with our community. To get involved you can purchase Pawn Bots on OpenSea, join the conversation on Discord and follow us on Twitter. We can’t wait to share more about what we have planned for the future.
