undead wyverns

The work and its context

undead wyverns is a 100-edition generative art series by hideo, released on Art Blocks on Ethereum mainnet, contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, project ID 338, through Art Blocks Factory, with heritage placement in the AB500 set.¹² Each output is a low-poly skeletal creature, built from procedural bones, standing on a cluster of glowing crystals against a black field of drifting particles; the creature slowly turns, and the viewer can orbit and zoom it freely.¹³⁴

The artist's description supplies the taxonomic conceit: "Dragons have been present in myths and legends across many different cultures, and have captured people's imagination for centuries. There are different shapes and variations of these mythological creatures, with different names. Dragons typically have four legs and wings, Wyverns have only two legs and wings, and Drakes have no wings and four legs. undead wyverns explores the procedural generation of skeletal versions of these different kinds of creatures."¹ The title is therefore slightly misleading on purpose: the program generates the skeletal bodies of dragons, wyverns and drakes alike, all of them undead.

The series runs on three.js 0.124.0 at a square aspect ratio with zero external assets, under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence.¹ hideo has five works in the AB500 set, the most of any artist in this batch: dino pals (100 editions), celestial cyclones (628), mecha suits (256), Legends of Metaterra (1,024) and undead wyverns (100), for 2,108 editions in total, and the artist's collector-metric rank stands at 8 of 308.² The AB5D dossier frames the practice: "Across five AB[500] projects, HIDΞ0 treats generative art as a meeting point between character design and games. The individual token is rarely the end of the proposition. It is a dinosaur, a playable field, a suit, a warrior, or a creature that implies a larger world around it."²

Conception and development

The conception joins character design to procedural anatomy. Where the artist's earlier dino pals established that "long-form generation can organize emotional cues as readily as abstract form", distributing personality rather than only visual rarity, undead wyverns strips the character to its skeleton and rebuilds it from rules.² The creature's silhouette carries the taxonomy the description spells out: wings or no wings, four limbs or two, and the viewer reads dragon, wyvern or drake from the bone plan before reading anything else.¹⁴

hideo is a Venezuela-born artist and computer scientist based in Santiago, Chile. The dossier biography describes more than a decade of development experience, an early practice in drawing, painting and sculpture, and a turn toward generative art in late 2020, with a stated interest in the intersection of art and gaming, "particularly the way interaction can make a computational work feel inhabited rather than merely displayed".² undead wyverns makes that thesis literal: the output is not a fixed render but an orbiting scene the viewer inspects like a museum specimen or a game asset.³

No project-specific interview exists; the registry interview field is null, so the conception is documented from the on-chain description, the dossier and the script itself.¹⁵² The artist's own website, listed in the registry as hideocode.art, is offline; a December 2022 Internet Archive capture shows it redirecting to hideogen.art, a JavaScript application whose archived shell titles itself "HIDEO - Creative coder".⁶

How the work was constructed

The full artist script was retrieved from the official indexed project record at the Art Blocks mainnet GraphQL endpoint, filtered by the exact slug undead-wyverns-by-hideo and corroborated against contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270 and project ID 338. The retrieved script is 43,550 bytes with SHA-256 digest 1f281bcb8abe4eb10d52c1fbcf4476612bb61ec21ff295f789c7389470df7ed6, and it was read in full.¹⁵ The registry records a script count of 6; the retrieved blob is a single minified bundle that inlines the three.js modules it needs, including OrbitControls, MapControls and the ConvexHull geometry code, so the count's semantics remain unresolved.¹⁵

The randomness is seeded directly from the token hash: the script parses the first sixteen hexadecimal characters of tokenData.hash into an integer and feeds it to a small Random class implementing a xorshift generator, with helper methods rdec for decimals, rbet for ranges and rch for weighted choices.⁵ Two named palettes govern the mood, "Normal" (dark background, pale bones, dark nest) and "Negative" (white background, deep violet bones), while a list of named light colors, including bumblebee, pumpkin and elemental names such as Earth, Fire, Forest, Ice, Magic, Metal, Thunder and Water, tints the crystal clusters and the light that spills onto the bones.⁵⁴

The anatomy is assembled from procedural bones: the code is dense with spine, tail, wing and bone construction, and crystals are convex polyhedra built with the bundled ConvexHull routines, with spotlights for illumination.⁵ A render loop turns the creature with a random rotation direction chosen per token, and the bundled OrbitControls wire drag-to-rotate, wheel-to-dolly and touch gestures.⁵ In the live renderer all of this was exercised: the reported hash matched the chain record exactly, the scene animates continuously, a pointer drag rotates the view and a wheel gesture zooms it, and the page holds a single canvas with no audio or video elements.³

The mint

The dated record, observed in the current Art Blocks index on September 20, 2026, shows a sale of just under eighteen minutes.¹⁷ Edition 0 was minted on July 25, 2022 at 22:42:55 UTC, nine days before the public sale, and the project was activated on July 27, 2022 at 23:26:51 UTC.¹ The registry's sale-start timestamp reads August 3, 2022 at 17:00:00 UTC, and the official collection page carries "Released Aug 3, 2022, 5:00 PM UTC".¹⁸

The public sale consumed the hundred editions in about seventeen minutes and fifty-one seconds: edition 1 minted at 17:00:44 UTC, edition 10 at 17:15:59 UTC, editions 20 and the AB5D treasury's edition 40 in the same minute at 17:17:08 UTC, and the final edition 99 at 17:17:51 UTC, the recorded completion time.¹⁷ The minted count equals the maximum of 100, and the project is marked complete, locked and active, with the paused flag false.¹ The registry's current price field reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout administrative value; no dated 2022 source inspected here states the original mint price.¹ The AB5D collection holds exactly one edition, number 40, held by wallet 0xdd19308a9731cdecb67e0d80ca6823394208c045.⁷⁹

Copyright and licensing

The project registry reports the artwork licence label "CC BY-NC-ND 4.0" for undead wyverns, with the terms URL recorded in the record.¹ This essay therefore categorizes the artwork licence as creative-commons, variant CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.¹ The deed grants the freedom to Share, to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, under three conditions: Attribution, giving appropriate credit with a link to the licence and an indication of changes; NonCommercial, no use for commercial purposes; and NoDerivatives, distributing only the unadapted material, so remixes and transformations may be made privately but not shared.¹⁰

The script carries no licence header or copyright comment of its own, so no code licence is reported for this package; the absence is recorded rather than resolved.⁵ The registry lists zero external asset dependencies; the sole runtime dependency is the three.js 0.124.0 library noted in the script type, parts of which are inlined in the bundle.¹⁵ Owning an undead wyverns token conveys no copyright by itself, and no conflicting licence statements were found in the inspected sources. Images in this essay are referenced through canonical Art Blocks token pages and media rather than republished.⁷

Close reading of examples

Five outputs were inspected directly through their platform media, and the header was additionally exercised in the live renderer.³⁴

Edition 40 (token 338000040, minted August 3, 2022 at 17:17:08 UTC, seventeen minutes into the sale), the AB5D-held header, is the two-headed one: a cyan-blue skeletal creature whose spine forks into two full skulls, perched on orange-yellow crystals under gold-tinted light, its long segmented tail draping down the crystal face.¹⁷⁹⁴ In the live view the creature rotates slowly, a drag swings the camera around it and the wheel dollies in until individual bones fill the frame; the page is silent.³

Edition 0 (token 338000000, the July 25, 2022 pre-activation mint) reads as a drake by the artist's own taxonomy: no wings, four clawed limbs, a long beaked skull, pale bones on a tall lavender-white crystal, the black field seeded with dim particles.¹⁷⁴ Edition 1 (token 338000001, the first public mint) is a pink-boned winged form with long thin wing spines, a golden glow in its ribcage, standing on orange crystals under warm light.⁷⁴

Edition 10 (token 338000010) sweeps two huge wing spikes upward like antennae, green-tinted bones over a purple-magenta crystal cluster.⁷⁴ Edition 20 (token 338000020) spreads the broadest wings of the sample, pale green bones above mint and blue-green crystals, tiny blue particles in the field.⁷⁴ Across the five, the bone-plan grammar is constant; wing count, skull shape, palette and crystal tint vary, and the Negative palette did not appear in this sample.⁵⁴

Significance and limitations

undead wyverns is the batch's clearest statement of hideo's world-building thesis: a hundred procedural skeletons that imply a bestiary, a museum and a game at once, from an artist whose five projects and rank of 8 of 308 make them the most collected figure in this set.¹² It is also one of only two 100-edition series in this batch, and its free orbiting camera makes it the most overtly interactive.¹³

Unresolved research questions, flagged for review:

• The original mint price at the August 2022 sale is not established by any dated 2022 source inspected here; the current registry price reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout value.¹
• No project-specific interview exists; the registry interview field is null.¹
• The registry records a script count of 6 while the retrieved blob is a single minified bundle with inlined three.js modules; the count's semantics are unresolved.¹⁵
• The artist's registry-listed website hideocode.art is offline and redirects in archived captures to hideogen.art, whose archived shell requires JavaScript; no stable artist-authored statement was recoverable from it.⁶
• The elemental light-color names seen in the script (Earth, Fire, Forest, Ice, Magic, Metal, Thunder, Water and others) are not documented as an official feature list in any inspected source; their mapping to market-facing traits is inferred.⁵