It was obvious right after LarvaLab's Meebits drop that this week's cover art would be built from voxels. We discussed several overcomplicated scenes with Cryptopunks and Bored Apes, but once our new mascot came to life it was clear he deserved the spotlight for our readers to fully appreciate his slick moves!

I kicked off the voxel avatar on Wednesday with only a Meebit reference image, all that was available to me at the time. If I had waited until Friday when Larva Labs released the .vox files to Meebit owners, I could have saved some time. No worries though, voxel building is so much fun, and this means our lion is made from scratch, voxel by voxel. No copypasta!

He ain't no saint!

The next step was to teach our lion some new moves. Once you have the voxel model ready it is actually tremendously easy to animate the character using the online tool mixamo.com. You can learn more about auto rigging 3D characters in my guide here.

Animation test footage with older model version

That guy's got some moves! I exported the animation and brought it to Cinema4D to make a nicer render with some lighting. A bit of post-processing in After Effects and the cover is done. But what about that QR code on the artwork?

Try it out by giving it a scan it with your phone camera. For the first time, we have introduced an augmented reality (AR) feature within our cover art! It is made with Adobe AERO and uses the very same 3D model.

If you want to have a closer look at the beauty of perfectly aligned voxels, head over to the Cryptovoxels Metaverse where we set up a small RLG Mascot reveal Expo. 

By purchasing this week's issue you will get access to the source .vox and other 3D formats, so you can play with the model, or cruise in style throughout the metaverse.