[DAO:372afe6] Build an app to create wearables for decentraland without technical skills

Governance
1

by 0x6042a0368f7bf354b44aab2fad70c4977dc24afb (MandyJennifa#4afb)

Should the following Tier 5: up to $120,000 USD, 6 months vesting (1 month cliff) grant in the Community category be approved?

Abstract

We identified that there was no existing tool that gave users the ability to create their own clothing for the metaverse without technical 3D design skills, advanced software and expensive hardware. These constraints limit the creative output of the Decentraland community. Over the past 12 months, our team has invested capital and time in building our first version of the MOD Studio software. We are seeking to further develop the studio with specific updates to support Decentraland users. These updates will include - importing Decentraland avatar armature and wearables, creating a catalogue of 100 Decentraland wearables, and building a live editor so users can easily create 3D assets in real time.

Grant size

108,000 USD

Beneficiary address

0x001A6eABE9bC521b755fE3fB879A1fcD4F1b1A2b

Email address

amanda@getmod.studio

Description

Our mission is to empower a global community of metaverse creators through intuitive technology. The team at MOD have been working for 12 months with experts in the field to create an intuitive application that allows users to easily make 3D wearables and accessories in the simplest way. Our achievements to date include building MOD Studio, a Unity, web browser based application that enables users to select from an extensive library or upload their own wearables and easily edit textures and materials to create high quality custom assets to wear or sell in the metaverse. Users are also able to adjust the lighting, skybox image and take pictures within the studio. With MOD Studio it is quick, easy and cheap for artists and communities to bring their vision to life, while staying in full control of the creative process. The software can be trialled here: https://app.getmod.studio/

We believe our application will be invaluable to the continued success of Decentraland. It will make 3D modeling and design more accessible to the Decentraland community, including the large user base without access to technical knowledge, expensive hardware and advanced software. For example, the cost to hire a designer to make a simple item like a T-shirt, hoodie or pants starts between $50-150, with an additional fee to publish to Decentraland. This makes wearables financially inaccessible to many users. Currently, there are no transaction fees in MOD Studio. In 2023 we will be implementing small transaction fees to publish wearables created in the software. This feel will be minimal in order to keep the application accessible to everyone and attract a wide user base.

Specification

The key updates that will benefit Decentraland users include:

1. Optimize MOD Studio for Decentraland

a) Import Decentraland avatar armature with wearables

b) Decentraland color palette incorporated into default textures and materials

c) Export wearables with 2 textures (512 x 512px)

Benefits

  • Simplify the process for creating Decentraland wearables while maintaining a high quality output
  • Make creating more accessible
  • Allow collaboration between artists and within communities
  • Ability to easily update existing models

2. Create a catalogue of 100 wearables based on community feedback

Benefits

  • Provide a wide range of wearables for artists and designers to modify
  • Guided by Decentraland users’ feedback
  • Hire existing Decentraland creators
  • Reduce revisions, thereby reducing work for Decentraland DAO as all wearables will abide by the existing guidelines

3. Live editor so that users are able to create wearables in real time easily by drawing or dragging stickers - see what you’re doing, while you’re doing it.

Benefits

  • Allow 2D artists to start creating in 3D
  • Simplify the process of 3D design to make it available to everyone
  • Not available in any other metaverse

We have determined these features based on the following feedback from testing a basic Studio we built for Decentraland (https://www.getmod.art/try-now-dcl): (1) Users were unable to import existing models and armature; (2) users had access to a limited number of wearables and requested more; and (3) users lacked the software to edit templates or found this difficult as they couldn’t see them updated on the model in real-time.

Personnel

The project will be carried out by the MOD Studio team. Amanda, Robert , Zoiner and Scott will lead the project.

Amanda Pope (Co-founder, Project management) - Amanda has been an active member of the Decentraland community, working closely with the Limewire team and Decentraland Foundation to bring fashion to their iconic Decentraland experiences. These include the We Set the Trends, Migos and Jim Jones debut and Limewire MVMF22.

Robert Nava (Co-founder, Project Management) - Robert is an entrepreneur with over ten years of experience in Technology, Digital Sales and Marketing. Robert is immensely knowledgeable and experienced in XR, metaverse, and blockchain technology, and an active member of the Metaverse Standards Forum.

Zoiner Tejada (CTO, Cloud Architect) - Zoiner has more than 20 years of experience in the software industry as a software architect, CTO, and start-up CEO. He was among the first to receive a Microsoft Azure MVP (“Most Valuable Professional”) designation and has since been awarded the MVP for eight consecutive years, including a dual MVP award for Azure and Data Platform and most recently for Artificial Intelligence (AI). Additionally, he is recognized by Microsoft as a Microsoft Regional Director.

Scott Reed (Senior Engineer, Cloud Architect) - Scott has 30 years experience as a cloud architect, starting at IBM in 1993. Scott is responsible for the day-to-day oversight, strategy, and supervision of our technical development system and team.

Roadmap and milestones

First Objective:

  • Optimize MOD Studio for Decentraland

Total estimated time: 4 weeks

Second Objective:

  • Build the live editor

Total estimated time: 8 weeks

Third Objective:

  • Gather feedback from the community to curate the wearables catalog
  • Hire 3D modelers from within the Decentraland community
  • Finalise and test catalog of wearables

Total estimated time: 4 weeks

Total project estimated time: 12-16 weeks

Design budget: $5,000
Development budget: $90,000
Wearables creation budget: $12,000
Hosting fees: $1,000

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

2 Likes
3

Happy to answer any questions about the proposal!

4

Voted NO

For the same reason i voted NO on this:

2 Likes
5

Coming from someone who doesn’t create their own wearables, I find this a waste of resources. It is relatively cheap to get someone to model it for you.

6

I personally love the idea but as @ArtReYou pointed out, some folks are against it based on the impact to the market, I believe some folks are against it due to people’s livelihood’s taking an impact.

ref: Wear Essentials - Wearables for everyone

I am working on Wear Essentials privately with only 1 engineer at the moment and it will take longer than I would like (after the original proposal we made was not approved) however you have my vote and wish you all the best, I see the positive to this for the economy and onboarding new talent with more followers into the space.

Edit; It’s struggling to calc my VP, will try again later!

4 Likes
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Hey @ArtReYou,

Thank you for taking the time to comment and referring me to the other proposal. I can see you comment in the other thread:
“I voted no because i don’t see any benefit for the DCL Community. T-Shirts / Hoodies are Basic Wearables and there are a lot of Creators on Fiverr offer this for pretty cheap if you are not able to create this by your own with Blender or Maya.”

The benefit to the community comes from removing the barrier of entry to creating wearables and empowering users with the tools to do it themselves. At the moment creating wearables is hugely inaccessible to the regular Decentraland user. I think it will attract users to the platform as there will be a fun way to create their own fashion while also benefitting the DAO who will see an uptick in submissions with a low revision rate as they will be made to the correct base models, be weight painted correctly, be the correct poly count, etc.

On the note of making it yourself or hiring, unfortunately a lot of people in the metaverse don’t come from a gaming or 3D design background and so don’t have a computer that can run blender or maya. This was a problem we identified and the reason we made our first version as a web-browser based app.

Additionally, hiring a freelancer isn’t that cheap, especially when there are revisions and the DCL publishing fee. I think a lot of the community are worried that this will make wearable designers redundant and rightly so, but I disagree. there will always be a role for 3D modellers and designers alongside MOD Studio as there will always be a demand for unique, highly custom skins like your profile picture but some people, like irl, just want to rep basic merch with cool designs in the metaverse.

Also, in cases where you can create something yourself, it is more fun and rewarding. With the Live Editor we will build users will have fun designing and bringing their specific vision to (virtual) life; especially 2D artists, graphic designers, tattoo artists, musicians who to date haven’t been in full control of this creative process. This will be a great experience for Decentraland users.

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Hey Malloy,

Thanks for your support!

Good on you for continuing to build. We have been building the first version of the software for a year now and are ready to integrate Decentraland AND we have a team of engineers, so I can imagine how hard you’re working alongside your engineer.

I’ve read through your proposal and think we are definitely on the same wavelength with this and both have similar visions, would love to discuss more.

9

Hey Tudamoon,

Thanks for taking the time to comment!

I do agree with this, it isn’t hard to find someone to pay on Fiverr to create wearables starting at $50-100. It can also be more expensive if there are revision.

At the same time, there are a lot of creative people in the community who would like to do it themselves who are 2D artists, fashion enthusiasts or just like playing around for enjoyment.

This will also be benefit the Decentraland economy as there will be more wearable submissions to the DAO with low revisions thus work for the DAO. They will also be more likely to take the step, pay the $150 fee and publish them as they didn’t have to pay $50-$100 to get the model and feel a strong connection to the design as they created it themselves.

Additionally, people are often getting taken advantage of as they don’t understand how 3D modelling and design works. These are people who don’t often work with freelancers, they just want some merch to rep in Decentraland E.g. if they are buying 5 shirts with different designs the freelancer will charge them 5 times as opposed to charging them a base fee for using the model and a lower fee for time taken to change the designs.

1 Like
10

Thank you for the answer. I really respect your efforts and ideas.
Me personal, i don’t buy any Basic Wearables. The market is flooded with this kind of wearables. There are some Wearable creators in the Community and i do support them and i also try to motivate users to learn something and create by themselves. I would love to see more ppl connecting and learning from each other. This is my personal vision here: Learn, adapt & create - Pushing to the next level.
I wish you all the best and good luck with your project.

2 Likes
11

Thank you @ArtReYou even though we aren’t in alignment it’s great to hear your perspective so hopefully down the track we may be. Have a great day.

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Any feedback from those voting no would be appreciated

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Hello Amanda. Our chat was very enjoyable thank you and I love what this can do. Would help those that don’t have the time to learn the skills or the money to pay others to do it for you. I had some fun playing around with it. Wish I could post some of the results here for others to see. Was soo easy.

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I uploaded a couple of examples I did really quick.
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1 Like
14

Great stuff! Your designs look awesome and this is just with the lite trial studio, I can’t imagine what you will create if we have the opportunity to push the DCL updates to MOD Studio.

Thanks for taking the time to leave feedback!

1 Like
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Yea i can see a lot of creators who want to strangle hold the market and not lose clients vote no to this. They really dont care about creation and expanding easier wearable creation to the masses.For them its me me me and profit not whats good for the greater good. Wont say no names but just check the votes.

1 Like
16

Speaking from experience after working with Amanda and MOD I can only support this initiative. I’m representing LimeWire and we worked with Amanda for our LimeWire main stage at the Metaverse Music Festival 2022. Turnaround times and the final wearable designs were amazing and we even made it to #2 in the creator charts and our LimeWire sneakers were the 2nd most sold item of the festival week.
MOD significantly simplifies the wearable creation and this can only be good for the DCL community.

1 Like
17

i would vote yes to this
I think its a great idea as a creative my self this has been a problem for me trying to create decentraland wearables . I came a cross this software and giving the lite version a try i loved it. I created some dope drip easy and fast and with out the middle man Im hoping to try the pro version soon but I can make some dope stuff with the lite version . it takes all the tech know how out of trying to create wearables and more on designs you want to put on wearables. . I also agree with Amanda when she says I think a lot of the community are worried that this will make wearable designers redundant and rightly so, but I disagree Too if your creative you will always have a job because you got dope skills and fresh designs or what ever it may be .There is room for everyone and every one 2d 3d artists and non artists. You may say that there is a flood of standard hoods and tees on the Decentraland platform but standard with a dope idea and marketing strategy is different. This software gives us the tools to onboard a-lot of non tech people and non designers and our Clients on to the decentraland platform through Fashion & streetwear Art & music using this software. When people build great tools the people will use and come it will benefit you and Decentraland .Saves time and money and at the same time this software can create jobs for people. this software can provide a good income for the less creative and the more creative person with the right ideas and a great strategies. I sum it down to a level playing field build create and innovate. Best of luck Amanda

1 Like
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I am friends with many creators and I do want them to succeed, but lowering the barrier to entry is a large driver of mainstream adoption. There will still be a market and need for high quality wearables creators, just as there is still a market for high quality sdk developers, when the limitations of pre-built solutions are reached.

It would be interesting if there was a way for modelers to import their own models into mod and be able to charge for their use, in addition to the initially funded free models. This way creators can be involved in the monetization of the platform and receive recurring income when their base models are used.

2 Likes
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Thanks for taking the time to comment Marcus! It was a pleasure working with your team for MVMF22 and I’m excited to keep working with you on future metaverse experiences. Really excited for what Limewire has in store for the DCL community.

1 Like
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Love to hear you’ve already tried the lite version!
You’ve mentioned great points here which I completely agree “build, create and innovate” let’s do it.

2 Likes
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Hey Mattimus,
Thanks for commenting! You’ve absolutely hit the nail on the head there, I believe the existing 3D modellers will just be positioned even more as leaders and experts as the creator community grows.

You bring up a great point here. We’ve thought about this and we have built out this feature in the core application - currently you can import meshes into the core software but we will have to push specific updates for it to be compatible with MOD as DCL requires the mesh to be parented to the armature. The specific update is mentioned under specification 1. a) Import Decentraland avatar armature with wearables.