Among other things, the AtomicHub offers an NFT Creator that anyone can use to mint their AtomicAssets Non-Fungible Tokens.

AtomicAssets has a more complex structure than existing NFT standards. Each offers significant benefits and allows for features that otherwise wouldn't be possible, but it does lead to the NFT creation process being slightly more complex.

This article will guide you through the process step by step, using the example of Garbage Pail Kids cards:

When you first open the NFT Creator, you will see an (empty) list of the collections you have created.

Collections are like big containers that everything else "lives." To get started, click the Create New Collection button.

This step should be very straightforward. Enter the information that you want your collection to have. Note that the "Collection Name" needs to be 12 characters long and can only contain lowercase letters and numbers 1–5. This is a restriction coming from the eosio name type.

The "Market Fee" that you can choose here is a fee that will be taken from every sale or auction of one of your NFTs. If you select, e.g., 5% and one of your NFTs is sold on the marketplace for 100 WAX, you will receive a 5 WAX fee.

In 99% of cases, you will not have to worry about the advanced details, and you can always change that part later, so don't worry about those for now.

After filling out the data, click the Create Collection Button. This will prompt your wallet (e.g., Scatter or WAX Cloud Wallet) to let you sign a new transaction. After confirming this transaction, your collection is created on the blockchain, and you will be forwarded to the Collection Details page.

On the collection details page, you can once again see the information you just entered and edit it. But to progress further on our quest to create NFTs, you must create a schema.

Schemas always belong to a particular collection, which can have multiple schemas. It is essential to understand what schemas are and why we need them.

The simplest way to store the attributes of an asset would be to store it all directly in the asset, e.g., as a JSON string. But that's very inefficient, making sorting assets by their attributes difficult. That's why the data of an asset is split into two parts:

What this means should become more apparent after you click the Create New Schema button.

As you can see, you can select which kinds of attributes you want your assets to have. You can add any number of attributes and choose their types freely; only the "name" and "img" attributes are predetermined and used later to display your NFTs on the AtomicHub. You also have to give the schema a name. This again has to conform to eosio name specs, so only a-z and 1–5 are allowed; however, this time, it can be shorter than 12 characters.

As you might know, on top of their names and images, GPK cards also have an ID, a Variant, and a Rarity. We chose the Integer type for the ID, and the text type for the Variant and Rarity, as that, is the sort of data that the attributes should hold later. The schema's name is "series1", as we want all cards of the first series to use this schema because cards of the next series might use different attributes.

Mint Numbers will automatically be displayed when you're using templates. We, therefore, recommend NOT using a mint attribute in your schema. For this guide, the mint attribute still showcases how it might make sense to leave some attributes in your template blank so that you can set them for each asset individually.

Once again, after clicking the "Create Schema" button, your wallet will open and prompt you to sign a transaction. After doing that, you will be forwarded to the Schema Details page.

At the top of the Schema Details page, you will again see the attributes you just defined, and you can also add new ones here. Removing existing attributes is not possible.

Templates are not required to mint assets, but they can be beneficial. Below, you will see two buttons, a "Mint new Asset" button and a "Create New Template" button. Feel free to skip Step 3, though.

As the name suggests, templates can later be used by assets to use the data defined in those templates and have it automatically applied to them. This is very useful if you create multiple copies of the same variation of NFTs. Templates belong to a specific schema, and a schema can have multiple templates.

At the bottom of the page, you can set the values you want your Template to have for each attribute. As mentioned before, any asset you create later can reference this Template and then have its attributes automatically set to those defined in the Template. Clicking the "Add an image" button at the top left will automatically upload your image to IPFS and fill in the hash in the "img" attribute value.

On top of that, templates can also have a max supply. A max supply of, e.g., 100 means that only 100 assets referencing the Template can be minted. This can be used as a form of provable scarcity.

You can also choose whether assets referencing this Template should be transferable and burnable.

For this Template, all the data for an "Adam Bomb" base rarity card is filled in. Notice that the "Mint" attribute is left blank, as this should not be determined by the Template but by the assets themselves.

Click the "Create Template" button and confirm the transaction prompt in your wallet. After that, the Template is created, and you can return to the Schema Details page.

You should be back on the Schema Details page now (or still there if you skipped Step 3). Just like templates, assets belong to a particular schema, and a schema can have multiple assets. Now, click the "Mint New Asset" button.

Similar to the "Create Template" page, at the bottom, you can fill in the values of attributes defined in the schema, and clicking the "Add an image" button will upload your image to IPFS and fill in the hash in the img field.

At the top, you can choose whether you want to use a template. In this example, we will use the Template that was just created in Step 3. However, you can also set all the values manually without using a template if that makes more sense for what you're trying to do.

By selecting the Template, the attribute values are automatically filled out. These values cannot be changed when using the Template.

We can change the value of any attributes that are not already set by the Template. The "Mint" attribute can still be freely chosen in this example. You can select any value you want; in this example, the Mint number, of course, is 1 since this is the first asset ever minted with this Template.

On top of setting the value for the "Mint" attribute, we now also specify who should own the newly created asset, and we specify how many copies should be created (1 in this case). These copies do not belong together; all that happens by choosing a higher number for the copies is that the same "mintasset" action is executed multiple times. Choosing ten copies is the same as choosing one copy ten times in a row.

Clicking the Create Asset button will open a pop-up for you to check the details.

Clicking the Confirm button will open up your wallet one last time. You can confirm the transaction, and your first-ever NFT will be created!

Going through this process for the first time can seem a little long.

Note: Remember that after you create your Collection and Schema, you can reuse those for new assets.

However, we have plans to simplify the process in the future.

For now, go check out atomichub.io, play around with the NFT creator yourself, and get ready for the things to come.

Author: Charles Arroyo-Bishop

Editor: Markus Hinrichs; Randall Roland

Translation: -

Sources & References: