A ~2000-piece NFT collection on Stargaze, structured as four civilizations across four rarity tiers. The work is split into two problems: holding a single visual language coherent across that many pieces, and building a generative pipeline that could actually deliver them. The pipeline became a method I've kept extending.

A side project I built alongside the Posthuman team — a four-person crew. Lore, world-building, rarity architecture, and collection structure came from the team. They wanted full constructability — NFT weapons usable across NFT heroes — on effectively zero production budget. I owned the visual system and the production pipeline end-to-end.

Context

A constructor with hand-drawn or hand-modeled assets was off the table at the team's budget and headcount. A neural-net layered constructor had its own problem: layered composition needs near-100% form consistency across slots so the layers fit together — which kills the variety neural generation actually offers, and small form deviations break layer compatibility outright. The team also wanted a tighter, concrete connection between heroes and specific items, abilities, and races — each one carrying its own narrative weight. The constructor had to live somewhere else. It moved into the prompt: traits composed inside prompt structure, generated together, every card rendered as a single coherent piece.

constraint

The lore sat at an unusual intersection: mystical space civilizations, epic galactic scale, with a tangible historical undercurrent. I built the visual language across three converging registers. Physical presence came from realism, used to give the work tangible weight — pulling a mystical universe down into something the eye can hold. Classical sci-fi carried the cosmic scale. Historical depth and the "ancient and epic" tone was carried by the oil painting style.

visual decision

Four civilizations mapped to four rarity tiers, each with its own visual register, palette, and signature elements:
Space Nomads — Common (1,000 NFT) — green palette, planets and ships.
Confederation of Light — Uncommon (600 NFT) — blue palette, tech.
Brotherhood of Shadow — Rare (300 NFT) — red / dark palette, mystic, infernal, dark fantasy.
Guardians of Balance — Legendary (100 NFT) — gold / celestial palette, space, glow, gold, epic

Each civilization carried 2 Characters, 2 weapons, 2 abilities, and a race (basically is the rarity group). Every trait — name, description, lore tie-in — was hand-written by the team. Visual briefs (palette, signature elements, references, examples) were locked per civilization in a shared planning matrix before any generation began.

Rarity system and traits

Late 2024. AI tooling was unsteady and unproven at this scale. What I assembled:
Base model — visual foundation, realism
Custom LoRA — style, oil painting
ControlNet — pose and object control
~1,000+ generations per civilization, with prompt experimentation mid-pass to introduce variation in the larger tiers
Hard manual curation
Junior artist refinement on selected pieces, with my visual QA
Card frame design made in Illustrator
Photoshop automation merging vertical generation output with square NFT card frames

pipeline

Pre-minted, then full mint sold out in one minute. As of April 2026, the collection holds 335 unique owners and 98.5% post-mint retention 16 months after launch. The community has continued the world independently — most notably with a community-written lore book extending the universe.
The hook is narrative. The team built a strong story and a real mystery. My contribution was making that story carry visually — clear enough at a glance, deep enough to stay on holder walls a year and a half later.

Outcome

The pipeline. The stack I built — base model + LoRA + ControlNet + prompt-controlled traits + hard curation + frame automation — was largely uncharted at that AI tooling level. I took it as a working method into everything I've shipped since, and it keeps developing and specializing across new collections.

What I carried forward