COLLAB2021 - Los Habaneros - House Interior Team

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....


The Official/Unofficial Story


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. 

What to do?

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. 

  • Omar Domenech(dostovel) replied

    We be having mugs. One step closer towards alcoholism.


  • Omar Domenech(dostovel) replied

    yyukinoh1989 Yukino, a small tip. Try to place object origin points where they most make sense they'd be. For example the bowl, it'd be best if it's on the bottom, that way using snap on a face it will instantly snap on the surface of a table or something like that.



    Same for the whale or the thing with the hooks. If the whale is a decoration that stands, then the origin could benefit with being at the bottom. The dresser hanging thing would benefit if you place the origin point at the back, since that goes placed against a wall.  



  • Cookie Dough(cgcdough) replied

    Maybe I'll turn it into a dresser, because you guys already have kitchen counters.

  • spikeyxxx replied

    Want to make a cuckoo clock and was thinking about how to rig the mechanism, because I'm not too worried about the modeling, but this is something that needs to be animated I think.

    Couldn't get it to work (easily), but then I thought, hey, we have Geometry Nodes now:

    The trick being that I can now rotate the Cube before it gets Mirrored and Arrayed ;)

  • Omar Domenech(dostovel) replied

    Melvin is getting a cuckoo clock, cool. Melvin you can thank uncle Spikey. Spikey, Melvin says thank you.

    Now I would like to know what exactly is happening there Spikey, can you break that down like you do the math things? Thank you uncle Spikey.

  • spikeyxxx replied

    dostovel it's actually not very 'mathy' ...the problem I was facing is that if I try and rotate something that has Modifiers on it, Blender calculates the Modifiers first, and after that rotates (for instance) :

    And that is not what I want here.

    Now, because Geometry Nodes is a Modifier, I can place it above/before the Array and Mirror.

    In the old days, like a few weeks ago, this would take loads of Bones and Constraints (I think, maybe another easy solution would have been possible...ask @waylow )

  • Omar Domenech(dostovel) replied

    Ok, I think I get it. I would have to push some buttons in Blender in order to the knowledge to really sink in.

    I guess you can ask Wayne if you want a more global solution to it, since Geometry Nodes is very new and Blender only, but bones and rigging is animation standard and common practice.

  • spikeyxxx replied

    It's the order of the Modifiers that is important, Omar.

    I know Wayne absolutely loves Bones, but I think that my scissors cut his paper ;)


  • Omar Domenech(dostovel) replied

  • spikeyxxx replied

    First block-out, maybe something like this:


  • Ingrid Frank(Fide) replied

    You guys are making so much amazing things, and I´m sitting here crying over my study books D: 

    Is the owl still allowed to move in even if I finish it next weekend?

  • Omar Domenech(dostovel) replied

    Of course Fide. Owls are like the wise creatures of the forest, what good is a wizard's house without an owl. 

  • Omar Domenech(dostovel) replied

    That is going to turn out freaking great. You know, since Melvin is the magical wizard minion creature around the house that helps his master with the preparation of the spices, maybe Melvin himself conjured up little helpers of his own with his wizardry and that cuckoo bird not only cuckoos in the morning but spends the nights flying around, doing spices related duties, and check this out, that little bird is made out of spices himself...... Yes Melvin is that good of a sorcerer.


  • Omar Domenech(dostovel) replied

    Melvin is the owner of a magic cuckoo now. 



  • Keith (beefkeef) replied

    Great idea spikeyxxx  I'm looking forward to seeing where you take this! 👍

  • Omar Domenech(dostovel) replied

    Two boats are parked outside. They don't fit inside.

    Man low poly is hard, I'm too used to seeing models subsurfaced, I can't judge if things are going well when doing low poly. 


  • Omar Domenech(dostovel) replied

    ladymito Your floor is ticking out of the room. You probably don't need the floor anyways. You can put it outside the collection so that it doesn't get link to this file. 


  • ladymito replied

    It's for reference. I'll put it outside

  • spikeyxxx replied

    Already looking a bit more like a clock:

    I must really get used to not using all quads ;)

    Also, I scaled it up a bit, because it looked rather small to me compared to the books.

  • spikeyxxx replied

    And the little birdie: