Lil Nouns DAO

https://twitter.com/farokh/status/1537542624952950785

TL;DR

A 3D Lil Nouns generator web app that allows you to compose and download your own Lil 3D Noun rigged character as a 3D file.

ORIGIN OF THE PROJECT

What’s up Lil Nouns?! We are Coral Orca and 0xFloyd, early builders in the Nouns community. We love Nouns and Lil Nouns, and we are looking to extend the Lil Nouns ecosystem with a proposal to build a 3D web application that allows users to generate their own 3D Lil Nouns!

WHAT IS IT

It will be similar to what we built for 3dnouns.com and will allow users to create and download custom 3D Lil Nouns. Users can sort through each trait to create the perfect Lil Noun, or randomly generate Lil Nouns to explore possibilities.

These 3D Lil Nouns will also be capable of performing animations, including a “walk”, “run”, “dance” and more. This lets users imagine what their Lil Noun would look like exploring a 3D metaverse! Once the perfect Lil Noun is designed, the corresponding 3D model is available for download as a GLTF file and can be imported into Blender and converted to other popular formats like .obj and .fbx depending on the user’s needs.

A 3D Lil Nouns generator extends the Lil Nouns ecosystem into the 3D world and allows for animations, games, renders and more to be built by the community using the exported model files. It opens up a world of possibilities for the Lil Nouns ecosystem, which will result in more derivatives and more memes over time!

Have a look at this https://twitter.com/coralorca/status/1552261876176027648 to see some possibilities.

PROJECT ETHOS

3D Lil Nouns will be freely available to download as .GLTF models and use openly under CC0. The community can use their 3D Lil Noun files for anything their heart desires! We also want to build in the open as much as possible and will be happy to incorporate any community inputs.

VALUE PROPOSITION

As we are all big fans of Nouns, we know that their success is largely based on the proliferation factor. Nouns has had many large proposals that have built out important side projects and we were the first project funded by the NounsDAO.

Currently, Lil Nouns doesn’t have any large extension project on the proposal docket. 3D Lil Nouns would be the first and act as a portal into gaming and animation.

Lastly, 3D Nouns has had numerous large accounts express interest and ultimately receive a 3D Noun model to display in their personal galleries (Deeze, Farokh, Benito from RTFKT, Bharat Krymo, and more. See collection opensea.io/collection/3d-nouns-figurines ). Some 3D Nouns are looking comfy in oncyber.io/deezepod2 and Deeze mentionned in a recent podcast how excited he is about 3D NFTs like 3D Nouns.

https://twitter.com/DeezeFi/status/1537568913059356672

We think the same thing could happen with 3D Lil Noun models, leading to a stronger brand! Once this proposal is complete, we want to look at the best ways to issue lil 3D nouns NFTs out to the community to create more value and interoperability. We will be having this conversation together.

SCOPE OF THE PROJECT

In order to build a 3D Lil Nouns web application, we need:

1. All Lil Nouns assets recreated in 3D. The scale of Lil Nouns is different from Nouns, so unfortunately we are unable to use the models from 3D Nouns and will need to remodel them:

• 236 heads
• 136 accessories
• 24 glasses
• Additional new asset traits for the lower body (following existing color palettes)
• Approx. 60 pants
• Approx. 60 shoes

2. The body will be scaled down to fit the new proportions and we will need to rig and bind each head to the animation individually.

3. Different 3D background environments for the 3D Lil Nouns generator. We will let the community steer this with us.

4. All 3D assets will need to be rigged and animated to supply the “walk”, “run”, “jump”, and “dance” animation. These animations then need to be loaded into the GLTF models and exported individually into GLTF models for the web application to consume.

5. We will include a feature to auto-select traits based on your lil noun by lil noun ID which will help everyone onboard the app.

6. And finally it will all be wrapped up in a 3D web application that consumes and loads over 1GB of model files dynamically. The application will efficiently render complex 3D scenes across multiple devices and screen sizes all while maintaining high frame rate (60fps+ on desktop and 30fps+ on mobile with minimal lagging. The frontend will be built using a combination of two popular javascript libraries: React and three.js. The interface will look similar to 3dnouns.com (although we want to improve on it), and will consist of a home screen, 3D world environments, asset selection menus, model download capabilities, and a profile picture studio for taking screenshots of the scene. The application will be hosted on vercel and will be available at https://3Dlilnouns.com, which has already been purchased. Development will also include cross-browser compatibility testing, mobile/desktop responsiveness, library maintenance, and website metric tools for checking website performance page load speed, responsiveness, stability, etc. If necessary, scaling for increased site traffic.

PROJECT TIMELINE

Based on the work completed for 3D Nouns, we estimate development will take around 12 weeks. Asset development will take place in tandem with the web application creation. Progress will be updated and demonstrated to the community over the course of the project, in approximately 3 week intervals, and open to anyone interested.

WHO IS BUILDING THIS

This application will be built by the same team that built 3D Nouns - Coral Orca and 0xFloyd. Feel free to reach out to us on Twitter, DMs always open.

• Coral Orca https://twitter.com/coralorca Coral Orca is the creator behind 3D Nouns and is responsible for all assets, animations, level design, and general look and feel of the application as well as marketing and business development. He has been active in the nouns community since june 2021 as its first builder, and has contributed to the project via collaborations with SharkDAO, published AR filters that were used by VaynerNFT and Budlight, and is also a founding member of the Nouncil. 3D Nouns Figurines collectors include Deeze, Benito from RTFKT, and Bharat Krymo to cite a few.

• 0xFloyd https://twitter.com/0xFloyd 0xFloyd will be responsible for development of the web application. 0xFloyd is a full time software engineer working in Web3. Floyd has been a part of the Nouns community since Day 1, and has worked on numerous projects in the Nouns ecosystem. Along with building 3Dnouns.com with Coral Orca for NounsDAO Proposal 2, 0xFloyd was the frontend engineer for NounsDAO Proposal 3, Nouns Party, and helped make significant contributions to the Nounify app with 12bnoun and nounder lastpunk9999.

COMPENSATION

We are asking for a total of 42 ETH to be transferred in one full payment upon successful proposal vote. Compensation was determined based on the level of effort required for 3D Nouns, and the lessons learned / reuse of previous work that we can apply to 3D Lil Nouns.

As a comparison, compensation for 3D Nouns was 32 eth (~$125,709 USD on 9/6/21). As we believe we can reuse and improve some of the existing codebase, but will need to remodel all the assets and add a few new features, there is still significant time that is required in order to make this a solid product.
We want to create value for the community, with a unique site in line with the brand and a step up from previous work. We arrived at a fair value of somewhere between 50- 60% of the original 3D nouns proposal compensation (priced in US Dollars). Additionally, the price of ethereum has been extremely volatile over the last 45 days, fluctuating between $900 and $1800, so it is difficult to predict if this volatility will continue and to put a “fair value” on the price of ETH by the end of this proposal.

• 41 ETH for asset modeling and V1 of the web application as detailed in the scope of the project section

• 1 ETH for 2 years of application maintenance. Subsequent years of maintenance and future improvements/features to come in separate proposals.

Thank you for reading this proposal!