Welcome! Welcome!
This here be Los Habanero House. Put on your sorting hat and be assigned to your seat.
Our Mission, should you choose to have any choice since you have already accepted it, is to make the interior of the Spice Vendor House.
It's a passion thing, for us who want to keep making cool stuff and get this project to the next level and get your skills to the next next next level or continue perfecting your skills if they already are in the next next level. We are just a bunch of guys and gals wanting to see those doors open and reveal an interior that feels like someone really lives in it.
So the official story is grounded in reality. The Spice Vendor goes out on adventures and comes back with rare spices which he prepares in his house. It is set in the real world. Yet we in the forums continuously joked around and kept making a ridiculous background story which people grew attached to. Sadly that story is not the focus of the Spice Vendor project.
But that doesn't mean we have to discard them, our crazy talks can appear on the house as easter eggs. For example statues or lamps on a counter can take the form of some of the things we've been creating through conversation. So it all goes as follows....
Melvin lives in this house or at least the house is his responsibility.
It's not his house, he has no money to own such a big place and money and ownership is for earthly people anyways. The house is the spice vendor's house, things inside are made for regular people, plus you look at Melvin and he looks more like he likes living in a cave.
The name of the busyness is Vadimspice Merchantile Homestead “Delights in Spice”
He is to the spice vendor what Alfred is to Bruce Wayne, a loyal faithful helper that very much likes to keep things tidy up. He is a master of spices and keeps the property functioning to its fullest potential, makes all sorts of arrangements, knows all and has immense talents in spices and its mixtures, everyone in town knows him and likes him, the owner of the house trusts him very much, he travels a lot so Melvin is the primary caretaker of the property.
Legend has it that the spice vendor ordered a package on Amazon and when it arrived they charged him a fortune in shipping weight, and he was like what is this heavy box? this isn't what I ordered, and when he opened it Melvin was inside and that's how he came to live in the house. How did he ended up in there? no one knows.
We kinda know where he comes from since somewhere in the house there is secret entrance that goes to his world, you exit the same house but in a different place for sure..
Turns out Melvin is secretly is a Wizard, with his wizard robes and everything, when he feels like wearing them. Kinda of like Batman, when its called for.
In his world he can grow the most exotics of spices, that is where he gets them and baffles his spice vendor master.
Melvin has a pet whale is his world...
The whale lives free and swims up river to the house when called for. Its name is Willem Alfred Whalfred DaWhale. Melvin sets up all his bags on the back and off they go, traveling to all towns, trading in spice. The whale may or may not have her own room in the spice vendor's house.
In the woods not far from the house there lives an owl.
The owl rolls around in an unicycle and carries a cement umbrella. He rides the unicycle because he can't fly and he doesn't realize he can't fly because the cement umbrella is too heavy. The cement umbrella was given to him by someone very dear to him and he doesn't want to let it go not even for a second. Plus he doesn't understand the physics of mass and gravity and you know he gets confuse, it happens to the best of us. He tries to fly but he can't do it anymore, "what in the world is happening?" he thinks to himself. His past is hindering his future.
So Melvin has a life here, he likes it. Though his noble heart sometimes gets him in trouble.
Melvin has a record for "Illegal Potions and Spells Lab Underground Operation".
But it was not his fault, he was tricked by No Mouth, All Action Red Nelb.
Melvin had no idea Red Nelb wasn't just ordering potions for his dying grandmother, Melvin thought he was saving a life, Mr. Nelb here was re-selling them and making a huge profit, cornering the market and Nelb blamed it all on poor Melvin. And now Melvin is trying to put his life back together, using his potions for the betterment of all creatures. But since people have two grandma's, Nelb tricked using his other grandma as an excuse and Melvin fell for it again. Luckily people don't have more than two grandma's.
But that is not the only life challenge.
Melvin has a bunch of merry friends, they are all good, each with their own personalities, except for the blue last one, he is totally a bully. Every protagonist has an antagonist, he even has the W, like Mario and Wario, Melvin and Welvin. More there of, blue is even the opposite of orange in the color wheel, destined to turn to the darkside.
Welvin liked to put some magical extra something something on the spices and got in trouble. Melvin was like "We are not that kind of store Welvin! No Mouth, All Action Red Nelb tricked me with his grandma, twice!" A fight like in the tower with Gandalf and Saruman broke between them on the third floor of the house. It was not pretty.
Just what we already have been doing on the collab. It's the chance to make your own stuff with the skills we already learned. For now we don't have a direction of how the interior is going to be. Kent is working with Vadim to give is a north to follow. We'll wait for that but in the mean time we can start working on generic things that will be in a house no matter what. Pick an asset and say you want to do it and have a go at it.
dostovel I think it was in this post:
https://cgcookie.com/questions/12591-backhoe-collaboration-file-sharing-library-linking
so how we go do this ?
first discuss designs so that it all fit
Random model stuff and see in the end how it is looking together ?
i was thinking about making some chairs,
any of these references that should work ?
I want to do:
Spice sack (this one have flour ^^U)
I want to use the treasure chest course to fill it with chili peppers and beans
Candles (liquid simulation? I'm really noob with it)
Bookshelf with books (Love reading ^^U)
If we're doing some sort of hidden fantasy laboratory I think I'd like to take a crack at Ye Olde Chemical (or Alchemical) Apparatus:
When we hand this project over to our benevolent animators, equipment like this might give them a little room for some dynamism in the scene - flickering flame and bubbling or dripping fluid, that kind of thing, if they wish. That will of course be up to them. :)
So.... this is where the secret hide-out is !
Some great ideas in here already, I'm looking forward to seeing them in 3D 👍
I was thinking of making a few barrels once I've finished Kents treasure chest course. I could imagine this place having a nice trapdoor leading to a musty wine/spice cellar maybe?
nice stuff to model:D wonder how the bag with spice peper and beans will be :D
really cool idea a chem lab would be great :D
some chemical scientish could live there with a pirate , wonder if they performed any experiments on the wale :o
same here , a trapdoor indeed is needed and some barrels, a basement for the wine of course and then the winebottles too ,
you think they will drink some juice sap too ? kinda like juice xD
In the basement there can be a lot of space, underground hideout 😁.
Hi, I made another one of my clumsy demo's:
In an earlier Class project here on CGCookie, I made this:
and hand-painted each piece of wood, one by one! This time, let's be lazy...
It takes about 15 minutes of your time to watch and will save you maybe hours of texture painting ;)
The method works not only for wood of course, but for any seamless image texture.
If you don't want to make the Node Group yourself, here is my .blend file, so you can simply link it in.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YIo8HAvCjkyoIU05m9dRpWQrjKZxdB85/view?usp=sharing
You know, I think we all have in our heads that a wizard lives in this house, but what about the following:
Melvin lives in this house.
He is kind of a magical creature in his own right, I can totally see him chilling out in this place, waking up, getting ready for work, going out the door with his briefcase and CG Cookie ID, getting to the office, sitting next to Wes, punching out at 5pm and returning to his lovely home. In fact, that can totally be part of the animation of this whole scene, Melvin waking up and getting ready and then returning home at night after a long day of work.
What say you all? I say we do stuff mindful of Melvin living here.