We’re ‘The Drum’ Award Winners 2023 – NFT of the Year

We’re very proud to announce that we’ve just won an award from prestigious Marketing Awards people, ‘The Drum’!

LairdSquared worked with GetNorts and Highlight PR to deliver NFTs for their ‘Papa Johns Hot Bag’ campaign. All modelling and texturing was done by us and then handed over to GetNorts for the NFT creation.

Click through here to have a read of the incredible news. https://www.thedrum.com/news/2023/11/29/papa-johns-cut-nice-slice-the-nft-market-with-award-winning-work

Pictura Bio

An animation for Pictura Bio, a group of clever scientists and AI experts, who have developed a method for Pathogen detection within minutes!

After discussing what they required, LairdSquared set about putting together an animation to showcase their technical work in a way that anyone can understand.

Papajohns Pizza – NFT Hotbags

A job for Papajohns Pizza, delivering 3D Hotbags, not pizza!

Designers Tom Hoff & Ash Sketch created some rough designs for some Papajohns apparel & it was down to LairdSquared to convert these into 3D bags for an NFT giveaway! https://www.nfthotbag-papajohns.com/

Below are a small selection of the 3D bags created for Papajohns.

Tom Hoff designed Rucksack
Ash Sketch designed ‘Puffer Bag’

Stag!! Stag!! Stag!!

I’ve always loved insects, but of all the insects, the stag beetle amazes me the most. They’re massive and the male ones are even massiver (or more massive, for the grammar nazi’s).

Over the last few years I’ve seen many female stag beetles, but never the larger male.

Until last summer… I finally got to see one!

My excitement was short-lived, as its head was missing, it was clearly not well.

From that moment, I decided to sculpt one in 3D and here is the result. Sculpted and painted using 3D Coat, retopo’d in 3D Coat, posed and rendered in LightWave 3D.

Low-polygon Drill

I’m enjoying SketchFab and uploading my models there, so thought I’d add the latest creation. A Milwaukee M12 drill. Main use is for Virtual Reality engines, as it’s really low detail, but actually looks neat in normal renders.

Modelled in LightWave 3D and textured using Substance Painter!

View my masks in your browser

Thanks to Sketchfab (who I’ve known about for years, but never really investigated much) I can embed some 3d models into my site, and you don’t need any plugins or anything.

Feel free to load the one above and rotate it about and stuff! Neat eh?

The model was designed for Instagram so is very low detail and quick to load, also means it should work on most fairly modern mobile phones.

Working with Tiny Giant…

I recently did some work with Tiny Giant, a company specialising in digital marketing and the use of Artificial Intelligence. They have used AI to generate ingredients for a small batch Gin production, or creating random names for horses in a Virtual Grand National event held online.

You can check out their work right here:

https://www.tinygiant.io/

Their team approached me to create three themed Augmented Reality masks for Instagram, what a cool job! All themed with the glitz and featheriness of Mardis Gras… here’s what I created. You can check out the masks for yourselves at the links below:

If you want to check out the masks in AR you will have to click these links on your mobile device:

Glittery

A glitter shader, inspired by the Arnold Manual and a very similar thing. Thought it looked nice, so gave it a go using the new LightWave PBR renderer

ArchViz Render

Waldemar Peter kindly shared one of his scenes on Facebook so others could test it and see what they got.

I brought it into LightWave 2018’s native renderer, and was quite pleased with the results.

6m30s to render at 2000×1332 pixels.