The Work

The Project

According to his bio: "BEEPLE is Mike Winkelmann. He makes a variety of art crap across a variety of media. Some of it is ok, but a lot of it kind of blows ass. He’s working on making it suck less everyday though so bear with him... :) "

In 2020, Beeple’s art crossed over into the Crypto space - being released as NFTs on Nifty - a crypto art market. Almost $600K was generated within 5 minutes of going up for sale.

Beeple’s Everyday Nightmare was an exercise in porting Beeple’s 3D artwork into real-time tools, and ultimately a prototype for an open world survival game based on his art.

The Brief

In 2019, I approached Beeple to adapt a collection of his works from 2D images to fully realized, interactive scenes inside of Unreal Engine 4. Having been a fan of his work it was an amazing opportunity to dive inside the mind of a madman and legend, seeing how he works and structures his projects.

The Process

The process for bringing all of this to life started with Beeple’s 3D scenes, built in Maxon’s Cinema4D.

Depending on the scene, I either used Epic Games’ experimental Cinema4D importer (for static scenes), or Alembic support (for animated scenes and assets) before bringing them into Unreal Engine 4.

After migrating these scenes to Unreal projects, I then led a small team to prototype a survival game, with functioning AI, thirst and hunger systems, and both third and first person gameplay, taking place in his various virtual worlds.