Out of everything in this post… this is what interests me the most about your process.
I did a lot of testing to come up with the best way to layer images to prevent overlaps.
As someone who has used Photoshop daily for many years, the idea of making these randomly generated images with so many possible traits turn out perfectly after they are minted just seems mad to me. When a layer is out of place, it can throw everything off so easily. The fact that the only major issues was with a few blemishes here and there is crazy. I cannot imagine taking the time to design such a large collection of images and then watching as some of the things that were worked on never actually come to exist due to how nothing is guaranteed. Or believing that everything was good to go and then something totally random happens and caused an imagine you seem more rare to some people since it is the only one with that error.
One of the cool things in the process was the images were created in ram and never hit disk. So attributes were calculated, then the image was done in ram and dumped right into IPFS. It was kind of a cool process I was really happy with how it turned out.
There was ultimately over 65B combinations that could have happened.
Quite the process indeed.
I can think of billions of other swimmers who could have potentially turned out to be something great that never came to be thanks to the slim chances of being actualized.