We sat down with Treeple Dreamers to chat about his remx collection TD Jersey which enters public sale November 16th at 12PM EST. Keep reading for some of the conversation highlights and collection preview. Click here for the TD Jersey collection.
remx: Tell us a little about yourself. Where are you based out of?
Treeple: So I am Treeple, I’m an architect in real life. I started my business in 2015 and then last year around October I started my NFT/Web3 journey creating environments, a PFP project, and all sorts of other things. I live in California, born and raised here. I really enjoy creating metaverse spaces because it allows me to flex my creativity in a way that I don’t get to do in my real job.
remx: How did you expand into metaverse building? And what inspired the concept for the Treeple Dreamers?
Treeple: A lot of people think architects are just at the drawing board and get to design and things, and that’s really a fraction of the job. It’s mostly code requirements and permitting and working with the clients on budget. So the metaverse creation has been extremely fun because it’s almost a hundred percent concepts and designs and effects and mood and all of the great things about architecture that architects love to do. You get to just do that almost a hundred percent. So it’s really great. No budget. I am lucky to build on a metaverse platform that doesn’t sell land. So there’s no restrictions at all on what I do. My spaces can be as big as I want and there’s no cost. So it’s pretty amazing.
The Metaverse is a buzzword, but it’s not used by a lot of people. So we’re in the process of onboarding regular people into the metaverse and people who are fearful of NFTs… as they should be. We try to facilitate that onboarding process and talk a lot about the principle that the Metaverse is much bigger than the blockchain will be. And we are definitely not tied to NFTs and we don’t have to be. What inspired my PFP project? Well, I drew the concept drawing for it years ago in a sketchbook during college. And I’ve always been somebody who enjoyed nature and going outside and always had a strong connection to trees. So I have always kind of been obsessed with tree people and that’s where Treeple came from.
remx: What was your process? A lot of the PFP projects were done through generative algorithms, right? Was yours created the same way or?
Treeple: Yeah, so the original drawing, of course was hand drawn with pen and colored pencil and then which was sort my preferred medium. I would draw that way and I would use baby oil on a Q-tip after the colored pencil was applied. You blend the colors on the paper using the Q-tip and you get a really, really, really nice effect. It looks unique, it looks different than any other medium. It has a cool effect. The baby oil acts as a sort of counteracting the wax in the color pencil and allows you to blend them like you would say, chalk or something like that.
So that was the original process. And then once I digitized it, I basically just drew over top of that original drawing in Photoshop. And I did do it generatively in the sense that I created layers in Photoshop and then used Python to generate 10,000 different variations of the PFP. And then throughout the process of going to Mint and I was very new to NFTs, I didn’t know anything about smart contracts. So not knowing that I could hire somebody or do some sort of smart contract to facilitate that going smoother, I gave up after I got to about 80 something and I thought, okay, I can’t do 10,000, I’m just gonna limit it to a hundred. So the rest of the PFPs are on my computer. And so I selected 21 of those un-minted PFPs for the remix drop. And so that’s kind of cool to include those finally in something.
remx: Yeah, that is really cool. It’s cool to be able to see for the fact that you had built that out previously, that you did all 10,000. That’s crazy. And then didn’t get to use them for anything. So really it’s really cool that you’re gonna be able to get to use them though.
Treeple: Yeah, I have a lot of well, not a lot. There was a select group of people that collected the PFP that were pushing me to mint the rest under a second collection. And that’s still a possibility. I suppose it’s really difficult to get traction as a PFP project with such a small number of units. So with a hundred PFPs, there’s no room for flipping and for the price to go up in the value, the secondary sales are nonexistent. We sold out and then nobody was reselling because I was offering the utility of airdropping metaverse environments to the holders. So why would they sell? They bought the PFP for almost nothing. I think it was around $13 for most people to buy it. And then they got metaverse environments that potentially could be worth thousands of dollars in the future.
remx: Selling a hundred of anything is a lot harder than people realized. So you had to have done something well.
Treeple: It didn’t sell out in minutes that’s for sure. It took a lot of work. I think the first 40 PFPs, basically, the people who bought those, I connected with one on one in some form on Twitter. So I do have a lot of people that are in the project that care about it a lot because they bought it because they got to know me, not because they wanted something that they were gonna flip and was gonna go up in value. And almost all of them didn’t know that Metaverse was part of the deal. So then once that got out some people flooded in and bought rest up. I think it took… the first 40 took probably six or seven months to sell and then the last group to sell out, that happened in two days.
remx: That’s awesome. So how did you end up getting connected with remx and this collab? What is your vision for it?
Treeple: Yeah, so I think you were in a Spatial space and I regularly attend those and you were talking about the platform and what you could do with it. It sounded really interesting to me. So I clicked over and tried it out and it was a lot of fun and I thought this would be a cool way to add another layer to what I provide. I’m not an NFT project in any way. I’m an artist just trying to make it. And so this was another way to provide that artistry. I see it as being something that hopefully my community enjoys and that they get some use out of. I’m hoping that eventually these jerseys can be worn on avatars in the Metaverse. I think that’s probably the number one concern of people that know me, that have heard about me doing this drop. Their first question is, well can I wear it in the metaverse? So I know that’s a long journey and it’s difficult. So hopefully we get there one day and I thought about maybe doing, layering some utility on top of your guys’ utility and that still may come. I don’t wanna promise that in the beginning I want people to buy it because they like the art first and foremost. And then I want them to be pleasantly surprised with something that may come.
remx: So I guess my question to you, what is something that you’re working on with the PFP project? What’s been your favorite part of all of that? Has it been building community? Has it been creating the spatial spaces? What has been your favorite part in all of this?
Treeple: Yeah, I think definitely there was a period there where I was kind of frantically for some reason frantically building spaces for them. And I did nine environment airdrops for them all within a period of probably two months.
remx: Oh my goodness.
Treeple: And so that was fun. I always have to shift gears. I can’t do one thing for too long. So I did a lot of the airdrops for them there. There might be more in the future but there might be other things that they get involved with. So that’s been fun. I have a couple ideas that I’m throwing around to try and help bring people together because at this point I don’t, My PFP project doesn’t have a community. It’s nonexistent. So my discord there’s no activity amongst the PFP holders. The community that I have built is centered around the education token that I have. So those people are pretty active in the Discord and are asking me questions and we’re building things. So that’s been cool. But it’s very separate from the pfp, that’s for sure.
remx: I didn’t know about the token. Can you tell me a little bit more about the education token?
Treeple: I became pretty good at building environments for spatial. So I had a lot of people reaching out to me for help and it was becoming too much. I had a YouTube channel and it was going fairly well and Spatial was using that in their official documentation, my videos. But I had to come up with a way to monetize and to limit the amount of people that had a right basically to DM me for help. So creating the token was a good way to token gate that and then I was able to create the private Discord channel just for them. And then I stripped all the videos off the YouTube channel and put them in the unlockable content of the education token. And I add more videos as we go and as questions come up and as new techniques develop right now it’s Blender centered and baking those environments into a GLB file and then deploying them on spatial at some point in the future, spatial will open up Unity for everyone.
remx: That’s really cool. That’s really showing using tokens and the ability that you can utilize blockchain technology in a sense.
Treeple: The only problem with NFTs is the idea is that you’re buying something that’s gonna be eternal. Obviously I’m not going to be teaching people how to use Blender when I’m 80 years old. So I did set up in the description of the NFT, the one-on-one guidance that I give people in the Discord is only for first time holders of the token.
remx: So definitely still available for all of those who wanna learn about spatial and building spaces for people and environment? Yeah, that’s really cool. I think the last thing that I have is what is a goal or a project that you’re aiming to accomplish or set in motion for the future? Do you have anything in the works that you can share?
Treeple: Yeah I’ve shared it openly to people that I was working on an avatar. So I have a friend that works at a game studio. They’re the game studio that does the Game Apex. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, Apex Legends. It’s a pretty big game. He’s a super talented concept designer. He designs weapons, clothing, characters, the whole character concepts. And we’ve known each other since high school. So he produced a concept drawing for me of the full body avatar based on my PFP. I started modeling it and in Blender and sculpting it. I am not a character artist in any way. So it’s been very difficult in a long process.
And so I’m pretty excited for that to get legs and for us to build that out. And I know how difficult it is to create an avatar collection. I really admire the project, A Kid Called Beast, and not sure if you’ve heard of it, but they have been in their community for a while now and hopefully we’ll be minting soon. So I’d like to do, yeah, I’d like to do that where it’s like a 10,000 piece avatar collection with Metaverse layered into it. But it’s a really, really huge undertaking and I can’t do it alone. So A Kid Called Beast is a huge team.
remx: Really excited to see all of it come together and what you have for the future. And super stoked for your drop with remx for the jersey that’s coming out. Yeah. Yeah. Can’t wait for it. But just wanna thank you again for joining us and having this conversation with us
Treeple: For sure. Awesome. Thank you for setting it up and yeah, I can’t wait too. Hopefully it leads to bigger and better things.
View more from Treeple Dreamers on his website: treepledreamers.com
Or follow along on his journey on Twitter.
remx makes it easy for anyone to design their own digital fashion collections. Check it out at remx.xyz
