Toby Liad

July 2018

Toby Liad was a “Daily Renders Bot” that I created and ran back in 2018. As of February 2024 you can still view images it generated by visiting tobyliad.com.

Beeple had already been doing his EVERYDAYS for years and years, but his reputation had not yet exploded as wide as it then did.

The everydays inspired me to wire together a generative Houdini scene and renderer and some automation to automatically post to Twitter to create a bot that could crank out a new render every hour. It successfully did that for a while, for a whopping 2500 images. So roughly three months or so. Over those months I was twaking the scenes to create more interest and quality and variation.

This was also before the proper blockchain/crypto explosion, NFTs, Musk buying Twitter, image generation AIs and LLMs and all the other latest bells and whistles of the ever-accelerating tech mania … ah, simpler times!

.