# Concept art: Tubby Cats Unique Item Thumbnails and Designs

This is a concept for a potential 3D tubby cats items pipeline.

### The concept: 3D scene pipeline for card art and 3D viewers.

I'm proposing creating a pipeline for the many unique tubby cats 3D traits in a way that portrays them in a believable, Tubby Universe. As a believer in the strong and iconic design of tubbies, I think that effort should be put into building up hype around what a tubby 3D universe could look like, and I think that showcasing the awesome tubby items in such an environment could drive further interest towards the project and bring more interest and funding towards M3.

One of the main strengths of Tubbies is how immaculately and carefully designed and structured the collection is, as well as its communities strong perception of the brand and art. Its important that whatever 3D derivatives get produced adhere to the strong brand image and aesthetic of tubbies and respect the communities perception of what it is. The community is quite alive and engaged in the creation of OC, and has been receptive of the many renders M3 has produced with the assembled 3D VRMs.

Some of the ways the 3D traits can be portraid could be through trading cards, assets in a 3D viewer app as hand drawn art or as animated gifs. I'll weigh these against each other and give my opinion on how they measure up.

- As trading cards, Tubby items could be rendered out in blender either with some kind of contextual background (a store, hair salon, cafe etc), or as simple transparent thumbnails pasted over a pre-existing tubby background.
- For the simple thumbnail option, the pipeline could involve manually rendering out traits over an existing background to give each item a unique, personalized render, and to make sure that rare items get paired up with special backgrounds that match. Overlay card art could also be manually chosen per trait, with rare items recieving special looking foil materials and the like. Although, since we are dealing with items and not characters, the card overlay would probably be minimalistic, with just the item name and maybe what type of trait it is and rarity displayed somewhere.



Some additional concepts have been thought up in TD Draw:
https://www.tldraw.com/r/8R3uIFRFV4xYwR7YLL8MV?d=v391.-3850.17979.9406.NieoygahSUvcEQmfrAeK6


- With the contextual background card art (having tops be on a mannequin inside of the tops isle of a clothing store, or costumes be in a costume store), these have the potential of giving holders more context about the item and lore, opening up an opportunity to invent "brands" and potentially involve the community in this process. The various trait items would be placed over a tubby mannequin and each mannequin would exist inside of a specific store / environmental context. Some items such as hand items may not require a mannequin in the scene. This could allow us to involve the tubby community and raise awareness for this drop by crowdsourcing and polling various ideas with them on how different tubby stores, brands, and important tubby universe and worldbuilding focal points are named and portrayed, data that will be useful for community buy in and asset / worldbuilding reference down the line.
- Having the items exist in real-world contexts also lends credibility to the collection as, most people when they think of clothing, fashion and traits, see them within specific contexts, such as clothing will typically sit on a clothing rack, new clothing specifically is to be found in clothing stores, and food items can typically be found at cafes and stores.


### - Some ideas for context specific 3D backgrounds could be:


### - A quick test render of what a 3D mannequin looks like


### - Other options:

- **Hand drawn art:** Some of the art could be processed through AI to achieve a hand drawn effect / alternative style, however this could be risky and highly experimental.
- **Simple animated gifs:** Simple transparent or plain color background renders of the items in constant rotation could be used, where rotating gifs of the items serve as thumbnails and simple modelviewer GLBs display in the animation_url. Possible opportunity to also use mannequins to attach specific items onto.
- **3D viewer with traits displayed inside of contextual background scenes:** Have the model be an interactive app within the animation_url.

**Thoughts:**

After considering all of these options, the simplest most time optimized option to pursue would be the 3D rendered items with regular tubby 2D backgrounds and simplistic card art overlaid over it.
However, I would advocate for trading cards with detailed contextual 3D backgrounds to be made for the traits and to involve the tubby community in creating lore around the traits, items and backgrounds to serve as a critical worldbuilding fulcrum for future Tubby 3D projects. I believe by imbuing the traits with a sense that they were created and manufactured in a tubby universe could drive further interest towards tubby wearable and could grow awareness for tubby traits and 3D avatars more than simple 2D background art would.