left: styling NFT | right: Cosmopolity planet created
Cosmopolity is a groundbreaking new NFT collection with a few very interesting traits. Each work in the collection contains a celestial body from our solar system (a star, planet, gas giant, moon or asteroid) whose surface can be reskinned by its owner. Â
To “restyle” or “reskin” your Cosmopolity planet, you would select another NFT that you also own, one whose artistic style you like, let your planet know you would like a new surface design in that style, and then sit back and watch as it comes up with a new design for you with similar colors, patterns and other visual characteristics to the NFT you selected.
You can do this restyling at any time, and as many times as you would like (within reason).
The inspiration for me in creating this project was the thought that an NFT itself could be sort of like an artist – that you might spend a lot of time teaching it to paint, and then set it free into the world and it would go off and create a lot of new artwork all on its own. Â
So each of the planets in the Cosmopolity collection is sort of like its own little algorithmic artist. You suggest a style for it to paint in, and it will do its best to mimic that style on its surface.
Each piece has a “genesis” attribute, which will be a real celestial body from our own solar system. This genesis might be any of the major planets, like Mercury or Venus, or any number of smaller moons, like Titan or Europa, and will determine your planet’s underlying shape and surface patterns. When a planet is reskinned, it always retains some amount of the underlying surface patterning from its genesis, and with a trained eye, you will be able to recognize it by its genesis even after it has been completely restyled.
Another interesting feature of each planet in the collection is that all of its traits are derived from the Ethereum address of its minter. When you mint a new planet, we seed a random number generator with your Ethereum address, and then use the pseudorandom sequence of numbers that comes out to pick each of your planet’s traits. So in a sense, you really are the creator of that particular planet with that genesis etc., and your Ethereum address is the seed from which it was grown. It may change hands a million times in the future, but the planet you mint could only have come from you. That is your planet. Â
The final unique feature of the Cosmopolity series is that it is all developed in interactive 3D on a WebGL canvas, and everything is rendered on-the-fly. Many of the colors in the render actually automatically adjust to match the current surface styling, adapting seamlessly when it’s either very bright or very dark. You can also rotate your planet around, and zoom in and out as well. Our website allows you to capture stills of your planet at high resolution, so you might decide to reskin your newly minted gas giant with your favourite NFT and then do a little photoshoot from lots of different angles.
We just hosted a very small early adopter launch this past week and so there are now a small number of these planets in circulation (200 out of an eventual 8000). If you’d like to explore the pieces in our early adopter collection you can take a look at them on our website at:
https://cosmopolity.art/planets
Note that reskinning is not yet active, so at this moment the planets still have their original stylings, all of which were chosen from various early civilizations whose artwork has survived to the present day.
Many new developments are coming in the next few weeks, including our public sale. You can stay up to date with our collection by following us on our Twitter, joining our Discord channel, and browsing our OpenSea page.
We hope you enjoy viewing and styling these planets as much as we have enjoyed making them!
https://cosmopolity.art
