For this interview remx sat down two of the team members of Mentallic Design. As they come up on their anniversary of Mentallic Designs, we were excited to go through a deep dive with these brilliant developers and 3D designers and explore not only how they got connected, but chat about some of the big name projects they’ve been a part of through their clients.
remx: Thank you so much for meeting me today. Super excited to have you guys on board and sharing a little bit more background about yourselves. You guys both have an incredible background and experience in the design industry. So can you share a little bit more about yourselves and your background before you guys joined forces as Mentallic Designs?
Graham: So yeah, my name’s Graham, one of an awesome duo, but there are others. Unfortunately they’re not able to be here, but we are the two that kind of do the most work. So basically, well, I was doing game development design, 3D programming on my own for quite some time, as you have seen. However, I happened across Matt’s YouTube channel and he was doing what he does best, which is sharing. He was sharing his knowledge of programming and he’s got an amazing community out there, Polygon Pilgrimage and I messaged Matt that I joined, jumped into his Discord. We’re going back, oh, how many years?
Matt: Six, seven years now at this point. I mean, it’s been a while.
Graham: Yeah. Wow. And we hit it off straight away. We connected on a level of understanding from programming design… 3D. We just wanted to share knowledge. As you can already tell, we love what we do. We love talking to people. So yeah, we went off from there and I jumped in. I ended up becoming one of his moderators in his Discord channel, and then he realized I was working on a few projects, and as Mentallic, we love building, we love creating things. So he was like, ah, let me come and help you. Let me assist you. So we got on a call and yeah, we’ve just expanded and grown with each other over those years. So yeah, it’s been an amazing year. Actually, come March in the new year would’ve been doing what would’ve been an actual business for pretty much a year. So yeah, it’s exciting, it’s scary. But yeah we’re utilizing our skills and we’re trying to do our best to do what we’re good at.
remx: Yeah, most definitely. What was your position before Mentallic? So you said your background was in design and gaming, but what particularly were you doing before?
Graham: Yeah, for sure. So I have always been into design and art. Now, I lean more into design technology and design. I mean it as a day job. So I’m very analytical. I deal with a lot of turn it off and turn it on scenarios which everyone would tell you if you turn it off and turn it on again. So I’ve always dabbled with programming. I’ve always dabbled with software and I think I’ve gravitated to doing programming and design and 3D work naturally. So I may not have been to university for it. However, I have done everything I possibly could to do that. It’s not exhaustive, but it’s been a ride. So yeah, it’s weird to say. I think I’ve trialed by fire, shall I say. There’s been some scenarios where I’ve had to go away and learn this information on the fly, but I soak up information quite quickly. So Matt will tell you if there’s a problem, we like to sort of what we call debug, duck it. So I’ll become the duck and he’ll rubber duck it with me. It’s a phrase, people will know what we’re talking about and then vice versa. So I’ll become the little rubber ducky and he’ll be like, Graham, tell me what I’m doing wrong. I’ll then sort of help. We’ll go off and Google the crap out of it if we can.
remx: Yeah, you guys seem like quite the duo, quite the team. I would love to hear more from you as well about your background and what your career was like before, Matt.
Matt: Yeah, well, way back, I’ve been drawing since I was three. I love just creating things that never were before. And in high school there were some computers in the lab that had some rudimentary 3D software on it. I just started playing around and I fell in love with 3D. I like drawing, but I like 3D more because it’s another dimension. There’s so much more you can do with 3D. So then I said, okay, I’m going, I’m going to go to art school. So I went to art school, I graduated top 9% of my class and I said, I love what I’m doing. I love what I’m learning. And then I graduated and I found out that there were no jobs available and almost half of what I was taught was over 10 years out of date. So I was just kind of stuck a little bit.
So I did the whole move back in with the parents and I’m like, okay, I’m going to get a job and work my way out of here. And I got a job in programming because I’m really good at learning anything. If you put me to it, I’ll figure it out. So I started with the programming and then I still had my passion for art. So I started saying, you know what, I’m going to learn to put these two things together and make video games because I like the art side, but then with the programming, I can bring these things to life. And on top of that, I have a very soft spot for just learning knowledge and sharing that knowledge. So I started a blog where I was teaching back anything I was learning, I would just learn something new, turn around and just teach it back.
Matt: And that helped me solidify the knowledge and also I wanted to share with the world. I quickly found out that a blog is great, but it’s very time consuming. Well, what if I made YouTube videos? A lot of this stuff is very visual, so why not? Instead of lots of pictures of a 3D thing, why not videos where I’m showing this off? So I started doing that and here we are 10 years later we’re now over 10,000 subscribers in the YouTube channel, and I have a huge Discord and still every day I get messages on Discord and I stop what I’m doing and try and help some people learn how to do things better. And from that I started getting some freelance work and I said, great. I would love one day if my full-time job was to wake up and do this every day and go to bed and the bills are paid, that’s great.
Sadly, we’re not there yet. But I started getting some freelance work and it started to really build. And so then I needed some help. And I came to Graham and said, at this point we had been friends from Discord and from my videos, and I said, “Hey, I’m thinking about turning this into a thing. Do you want to be a part of this?” And so we started working together and come March of 2022, March 1st, I created an LLC and said, let’s just be a real entity. And we did extremely well for the year but not enough to be full-time. But we had some big clients and some really good, happy clients is the most important thing for me. And what started as a silly little catchphrase really became our onus of good enough. What we tell every client is,” I’m going to make sure that what you have at the end of the day is as perfect as I can make it, because I want you to be happy with it first”.
Then I want other people to come to you and say, wait a minute, who made that? Because that’s how you get more clients. I don’t really care about money at the end of the day, as long as everything’s covered and the roof is on the house, I don’t really care about money so much. I want to do good work, put good things out into the universe and make good art. And so that’s kind of where I started. And now I still continue with the pilgrimage as far as the Discord, but I no longer make videos, but I do livestream on Twitch. So when I’m working, I get permission from the clients and tell them I’m going to be working on this project tonight, stream it live for two hours at a time, and anybody’s welcome to stop by and ask questions and I’ll explain what I’m doing. I’m sharing my knowledge. I’m by no means an expert, but I do know some things and what I know I’m happy to share. And that’s what’s brought us a current date. And then some of our clients were things like Mike from VVAMP and then also REY and Mike has introduced us to a ton of people and we’ve just kind of expanded. And so it’s just knowing good people doing good work. And here we are.
Graham: Mike has been influential on us, his connections and the way he is able to deal with people and bring them in and bring people together. I think he said on the Twitter Space, he loves networking people and he literally just, if he doesn’t even have to be there, he’ll just sort of drop a name and say, oh, get in touch with so-and-so. Yeah, he’s been really, really good to us. Yeah, it’s great.
remx: It’s all about who, and those connections are really, really helpful at the end of the day. It’s incredible. I think that’s the beauty of the Web3 space, that’s kind of, yes, changed the game because everybody I feel like there’s not so much of a competition most of the time. I feel like everyone is wanting to help and put people in the right direction with the right people instead of it just being about themselves.
Graham: Correct.
remx: It’s crazy to hear that you’re not full-time doing this because you have worked with some of the largest Web3 brands like YugaLabs and Meebits, Rick Ross. Like to say that you’re not full-time is crazy to me. But I would love to hear about your favorite job that you’ve done thus far in the Web3 space.
Matt: Well, I’d say one clarification I’ll make is we’re not full-time as far as it is, not my only source of income, but full-time as far as ours for sure. So one of the challenges is Graham being in the UK and I’m here, he’s five hours ahead of me. So my typical day will be 4:00 AM until probably 8 or 9 or 10:00 PM rather. So working almost 16 hours is a minimum. So I get up and for my day job I’ll get up and I’ll work from four to six with Graham and I’ll leave the house and I’ll drive to work and then I’ll work 10 hours there, come home and I’ll put in three or four more hours before the end of the night here. And it’s difficult to balance that with my wife and my pets and things.
And so it was like I wanted to have some time to just play some games and hang out with the wife and that kind of stuff ,too. But proper balance and a good team all around really makes it work. As far as our favorite thing, I had to write this down because to be honest, it’s a difficult thing to answer. Favorite is hard because I don’t want to alienate anybody. Yeah, we’ve done a lot of things with a lot of people, but more so than favorite… I’d say Graham and I are the kind of people who are problem solvers: you tell me I need to do this. How do you make it work? And we find a way to that solution. So I’d say the most challenging so far has definitely been the Rick Ross stuff. That was about five months beginning to end, lots of R&D and lots of figuring out the tech. And now we have a system that we can generate these characters with. And a lot of the NFT space has been generative art. Let’s put a couple parameters together, hit a button a few thousand times. Now we have all these things. We wanted that inventory without having to say just, it’s sort of random. We wanted a little bit more finesse to it, a little bit more bespoke within the random space.
Graham: Come from the client as well, isn’t it?
Matt: Right, yeah.
Graham: The creative and the design, and obviously they’re looking at it from a visual aspect. And then obviously we have to take that and work out the logic in the programming for this system.
Matt: And we have a third guy who joins us occasionally named Rich and Rich is amazing, and he’s a brilliant programmer. So he helped me with the system a lot. So I was able to brainchild how it’s all going to work, but then some of the interconnected bits down to hashing the algorithm out, that sort of stuff that’s a little bit over here. So that I said, let’s get Rich involved. And he helped us with the code to get it really kind of super clean. We even automated the build process, so it doesn’t even launch Unity. It’s all done at command Line. Wow. When ’em all said and done. So it’ll programmatically call things like Blender and Unity and do the build for the final product. So anyway we put together this huge amount of art and the system and for that project, they’re only doing 200 issuances right now, but there are 819,000 possibilities within the system. Holy
remx: Yeah. So that’s crazy.
Matt: So that’s been my favorite as far as the challenge of how do you do this? It has to be random, but then it’s very despoke because Rick is a particular guy. He wants it just so it, it’s his brand, it has to be on point, so how do you meet in the middle there? And that was the big challenge. Things like the REY boots are amazing, but they weren’t very technically challenging because it is a singular piece of artwork, whereas this is more generative and artwork. So that was where I enjoyed that challenge a lot more.
remx: Nice. Can you tell us a little bit more about what the Rick Ross project was for people who don’t already know about it?
Matt: Sure. So I can tell you a little bit about it. So what’s in the public domain? So this is his first foray into the NFT market. And it is 200 collectible pieces that are, I think it’s
Graham: Second, think it’s second. Second. Yeah, that’s fine. He did a car, something to do with some supercars I think.
Matt: Ok, ok. So it’s an avatar himself in a full 3D environment, you can click and rotate and view the environment. And there are five different backgrounds, five different poses, 30 odd shirts, six different glasses, and it randomizes these elements. And then these NFTs will also be key holders to, you can get actual items from him himself from, so his jewelry, some of things, based upon which ones you get that part, I’m not totally sure on. You’d have to ask. Our client is actually HitPiece and then their client is Rick Ross. So that’s kind of how we’re working with Rick through this process.
remx: Nice. That’s incredible. Super excited. Do you know when that’s going to be ready for the public?
Matt: I’m told the end of the month, if not beginning of February.
remx: We’ll keep up to date with you guys on that journey. I know these are changing.
Matt: Especially with the new year, people are getting their year plan figured out and some things might slip a little bit. But yeah, the current plan is from what I’ve been told.
remx: That’s so exciting.
Graham: We’re so excited.
Matt: Oh yeah, there’s been a lot of work. A lot. Most of that in the background is figuring those things out.
Graham: For those that can’t see. He’s got a big whiteboard.
Matt: Oh yeah. A big whiteboard.
remx: Yeah. So you guys also, you had mentioned REY and Mike with and they’re decent land, the craziest. You guys helped release that. What role did you guys play in creating that collection? And also, do you guys think that you’ll do more in the fashion world? What are your thoughts on the fashion brands and how you can help them?
Matt: Sure. Yeah. I mean, we’re happy to help any client really within reason. But I think that the, first of all, what we did for Ray was we just realized his vision. That’s really all we really did was we took what he comes up with these incredible designs. And I just took from the 2D page to the 3D space really. So again, my background is in 3D modeling animation design. So I took his design from a 2D element and made it into a 3D element. And then I walked him through the process of once the 3D model is prepared, there are certain areas on the texture that I isolated for him and he could do his artwork, but within those areas so that for remix it would put his actual artwork as being applied to the boots in remix. So I wanted make it clear for him that he can do his thing and make it easy for his artwork and his creativity to come shining through.
So we did a little bit of 3D modeling, a little bit of rigging, animation work for the avatar. You talked about the remix avatar getting on the feet and that’s one of the challenges we had to actually remove the foot because the crazy boots, wow, have an open mouth. You can’t see the toes sticking through. So that’s one of the challenges. So we just made sure that whatever he drew, we just brought to life in 3D and then made it work with remix system and then opened up the doors for him to do his artwork to become the patterns and get applied.
remx: Incredible. So now we know we need to just send anybody who wants some 3D work towards you guys, designer wise because those were insane and it sold out. That was one of the first few collections that I’ve sold out on the platform. I mean, we’re a new platform, so we’ve had a handful that have, but that was one that sold out very quickly.
Graham: What’s nice is we’re all early, you know, keep hearing that. And no matter how big the platforms are, everything is still early and it’s so exciting. You can almost touch it. It’s like I can’t explain it,
remx: I mean it is so true. We are really early. It’s crazy to think how few people are in the 3D realm and in the metaverse space and things like that. So we are really early. I have to explain to people what digital fashion is all the time. They’re like, I don’t get it. I’m like, you see those filters that you see on Instagram all the time? Yeah. That’s digital fashion. Right. And Metaverse, literally talking to each other from around the world in different cities, all in whatever you want to consider it first. Technically we’re in it right now. All just perspective.
Graham: Perspective in real time. Yeah, real time.
Matt: I find there’s a lot of people who don’t fully understand a lot of, I say laymans without being disrespectful. People who are not experts in this field, you talk to anybody on the street and you try to explain to them what it is, they don’t really understand because it’s a lot of technical avenues coming together. Have you seen the movie Ready Player One? They’re like, oh yeah, go. Kind of like that. Once you put the glasses on, you’re in the world. There’s a need for a lot for 3D because that’s kind of how we live our lives as human creatures. We live in a 3D world. But I also think there’s a lot of negative connotation with NFTs and Crypto because people don’t understand. It’s one of those things, human nature, we fear what we don’t understand.
You don’t understand something and you hear a negative thing about it and it sticks a lot easier than a positive thing. So I’ve tried to really learn what crypto is. How does the ledger work? And explain it to people so they understand. You look at historically when the television came out, most people thought it was evil. They didn’t have it in their house because they didn’t know what it was. It’s something wholly new. So it’s going to take time to adjust. And I still think we’re approaching the end of that adjustment period. I believe where people are familiar with technology in general, they’re used to their smartphones, they’re used to their TikTok filters and things. So they understand, oh, when I do this, this is what I see. They’re becoming more familiar with more exposure to it. So I think we’re approaching that point where it’s going to get easier to explain it to people what all this is. It’s just the next couple steps, we’re just a few steps ahead is all because we’re technical people. And once they catch up a little bit, they’ll be like, oh, I get it now.
Graham: That’s coming soon. I think the pandemic probably had quite a bit to play in that, because people were left to find themselves and find things to do to keep themselves busy. And there is no boundary to the metaverse thing. And like you said, what we’re doing now is kind of part of that, but there isn’t a start on an end. It just expands. It’s slightly, the universe, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and things just keep falling in. Yeah,
remx: Well it’s stepping stones. This is the stepping stone to what is, when we’re doing things more digitally.
Graham: Keep it simple. We’ve used an analogy kiss, which is keep it simple, silly. As long as you can work by that analogy, all tech eventually ends up in the hands of, as we said, normal people and they need to have it simple. So that’s why we love really difficult problem. But metallic, we love it. We literally, we thrive off of difficult problem, really almost impossible problems. And then we’ll kind of squeeze it, compact it, and then pop out the other end. Something nice and simple that someone can grasp. And that’s what we did for Ray.
remx: It turned out incredible. It’s so far everything that I’ve seen that you guys have done has been insane and just really, really, really great work. So I am curious. I know you’re working on the Rick Ross project, but yeah, is there anything else that you’re working on that you can share with us to look forward to?
Matt: So yeah, we’ve had a couple rumblings of more to do with Rick. They’ve mentioned, I think in a couple of their public spaces, they’re interested in doing a Rick themed Metaverse type thing. Which would be a very large project. So we need really to get on the phone and kind of spec that out. We have had some rumblings of some more work from Yuga from one of our partners, Danny Green. He’s been messaging us that there’s another project that they might need our help with. And of course, anytime Mike comes calling, I kind of make priority for Mike because he’s done a lot for us. And we do have a few other things that are just in the baby early stages. But I think we’re going to be pretty busy for the first quarter, first quarter and a half. For the first time in my life. I’m very happy to say that any brand new work, the meeting has to get scheduled at least a month out at this point. So it’s a nice point to say, I just physically can’t take the meeting right now because of work and other things. And that’s the first time that’s ever happened.
remx: That’s incredible. Well congratulations on that.
Graham: Thank you. We’re trying to expand as well.
Matt: Yeah, we’re looking for a third. Yeah, some extra help would be wonderful.
remx: Good. Yeah, no, that’s amazing. Hopefully some people hear this and are able to jump in and contact you. What is your social that they can contact you at?
Matt: Sure. So our website is Mentallic Design, and there’s a contact form on there. We’re also @Mentallicdesign on Twitter. That’s another big one. I know Graham and I both have access to that, but I think Graham does most of the social media stuff. He’s much better at it than I am, so I’ll just say, “Hey, can you post about this? Or can you ask about this?”
remx: No, that’s perfect because that way we can have people, everybody should give you a follow so they can keep up to date on all the projects that you’re working on and releasing. Do you have any advice, you said you’re looking for someone else, but maybe there’s people that are here who are looking into jumping into 3D creators wanting to create more in the web three space. Maybe they were doing things in web two on the tech side or development side. What would you recommend for them if they were interested in getting their toe wet and joining the web three community?
Graham: Don’t be scared of it. Be scared just surrounding yourself with people. I dunno, Matt, I
remx: Think that’s really good advice, honestly, because I think so many, especially surrounding yourself around the people that are in it. So you’ll forever learn from everyone else. And it also goes back to the network that we have built. Like you meeting Mike and having that relationship and the relationships that come from that. If you weren’t surrounded by people that were in it, you would never have those opportunities. That’s it.
Matt: Absolutely. Yeah. I think some of the best advice I ever got with anything including this, is always be respectful. There’s something you can learn from everyone, even if you feel like you’re at a position above them. There’s something I will still to this day, watch tutorials for things that I easily know how to do. And I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen a hidden little checkbox or a little menu I didn’t know about. Because everyone knows something different. They have a different path to get to that point, and I’ve learned from those things. Nice. And one of my mentors told me if you’re the smartest person in the room, it’s time to leave. So you need to go somewhere where there are people you can learn from. Don’t be afraid to be the new person from say, look, I don’t know, but ask questions because you never know.
Some of the most important things that I’ve learned about 3D art were from a fellow 3D artist who was sick of the institutions of colleges and things, charging so much money with his knowledge, and he put out all these videos, he’s a professional artist. He’s actually now literally designing a walking mech suit for the Japanese to go do pick garbage collection of nuclear waste. He built it in 3D and they’re physically building it now. And so this guy with that knowledge just said, here’s a bunch of videos of exactly how I do what I do. And so he just said, I want people to know what I know so that everyone can get better. And that’s kind of where, to be honest, a small aside, that’s where my whole thing with the pilgrimage came from was my slogan was, become a better artist every day.
And now it’s just become better every day because no matter what you’re doing, but I feel like if I can make everyone around me better, then art becomes better. And then when art is better, just everyone benefits from that. So I’m not about gatekeeping or saying I’m the one with the knowledge. If you want me to work for you, sure it’s going to cost you money and time and let’s work it out together as fair. But as far as what I know, I live stream and I go, this is just me working for two hours. Here’s what I’m doing.
Graham: When we’re creating, we actually do video logs of the development and we can share that back with the client. And I love it. And it brings them into the fold. Matt also his expert and outstanding way with people and being able to broadcast himself, literally walk people through, he’ll narrate over the top of what we’re doing, and then we send that off to ’em. We’ve got a client area where we archive everything we’ve done and we allow the clients to access those areas and they’ll be able to seal the link. So we’ll send them an email, look, there’s a link, here’s a video. It’s latest update. And it means also, we don’t have to schedule meetings. It can be tricky to get hold of everyone. Somebody might not turn up, but when we drop the link, we just sort of leave it to them to click it, watch the video, there’s no pressure. And it keeps it nice and free and simple.
remx: So yeah. No, I love that. I think that it’s really great to be able to share all of that kind of information with everyone that you’re working with as well. And also, again, going back to not gatekeeping and being able to really just educate and learn from everyone and being able to share that information too. I love everything.
Graham: That’s the ethos. That’s the whole, that’s what we’re here for, isn’t it? Yeah. Free to share.
remx: So yes, to share, most definitely. And to grow. And I think we are growing as a space by doing things like this, by being able to share that information, being able to share the advice, being able to teach each other the things that we don’t know. So thank you for joining me today and sharing so much information about what you guys have built, what you’re doing, your background, all of it. Super excited to see the projects that you guys work on and continue to build. And hopefully we can work on some more stuff together. Absolutely.
Graham: Oh we’d love it. Yeah.
remx: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed your company today on the show.
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