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.
Some eyebrows that I'm not satisfied with:
Maybe, there's a better solution?
Yes, a separate object, sculpt it along with everything you want to sculpt about the owl, and when you are finished you retopo as one mesh and bake.
I know that this is an early draft, but here's a rough side view of Michael Owlson(?) showing where I think that the knees could be better placed. Along with adding some movement to his hips/pelvis so that his feet can reach the pedals better without stretching the bones. By no means should you take any of side view as gospel, I'm just a slight over perfectionist when I see that things could be/look a bit better. I've also included a slight brow/eyelid in the side view if you want incorporate that or not.
Other than those very minor nitpicks, amazing work duerer. It's going to look very interesting when it's done.
P.S. are you thinking about sculpting some bits of raised fur clumps to the geometry or just leave it as is?
Something a bit like the feathers in Chicken Run here:
vincav81 Thank you very much for your side view sketches of Michael Owlson 🦉😀! This will certainly help a lot 👍! I already thought at moving Michael from side to side during pedaling in order to make it look more natural, maybe using "Drivers" so that it saves me some time during animation. The optimal angle between the pedals is another point. Are there real world pedals with a different angle than 180 degrees? Another point are the movement and face expressions ("Shapekeys") in order to evoke the impression that Michael is doing heavy work 💪🦵when pedaling due to the concrete umbrella☔. I'm also planning to sculpt some bigger feathers that I incorporate in the retopologized mesh. Smaller details should be baken into various textures as done in the April 2021 Collab.
duerer I'm no expert on bike pedal angles, sorry.
Other than aiming to get it done, I think I based the pedal arrangement in the first owl sketch on the crankshaft principle(?); how if to piston are set 180 degrees from one another they can't turn over at a certain point in the stroke. Which is roughly why crankshafts aren't 180 degrees apart. If that was clear, I don't know, sorry.
duerer After having recently been on an exercise bike, I'd like to correct my previous hypothesis and say that the owl's hips should tilt on the Y-axis and not on the Z-axis.
Although I don't know if we aren't over thinking what is supposedly a desk lamp automaton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton) and making it into a realistic animated character instead?
Thank you, vincav81 for sharing your thoughts on the pedals. I'm thinking at two versions of the owl:
1) As a desk lamp automation similar to the Pinocchio from your linked Wikipedia article:
By Pasimi on Wikipedia here, CC BY-SA 4.0 .
The up and down movement in the animated Gif above is probably necessary in order to ease tensions since the wood puppet can't tilt its hips as a real cyclist.
Of course, the owl would then need some kind of support or magic (indicated by some visual effect) to keep it upright.
Since we don't have electricity, our owl lamp would get it's light from burning oil or candles.
2) As a guardian on Omar's stone bridge. In the night, the eyes would turn into searchlights for intruders 😉. This owl would tilt its hips and the wheel would tilt accordingly. The animation would need to indicate that the owl with its monocycle is pressed onto the ground by the heavy concrete umbrella.
Here is my rough attempt to include a seat or pole that just goes straight through the owl, ie. make it as though the owls fur is covering the seat (which wouldn't be modelled). If that's clear.
And what may turn out to be an optional second wheel, so that there can be at least 1 hard connection between the owl and the base plate to allow the main wheel to move in the first place.
As well as a rough guess at how a Pinocchio-style, wood sculpted owl might work.
Kind of like this, but this example has the hinges on the inside of the body rather than on the outside.
I apologies if all of this is making what should be your "just for fun" project more complicated than it already could have been.
Mea culpa.
Well at least I love how deep you guys are going with it, no matter if it's just for a small detail. Plus there's all the experience point you gain when working, that never goes to waste.
I've added some worthy bells to Michael's umbrella in order to further commemorate the Collab 2020:
dostovel A budding romance novelist, I see. Who is this girl that gets our spice vendor all "tongue-tied?" What was the Indian's secret to health and prosperity that allowed him to back out of his business arrangement? Who or what is living on his property? So many questions.
Love it! If you happen to change the name under my portrait you could use "Ullrich." It is the ancient surname mine is based on.
Once we complete the interior and Melvin is walking around inside the house, he will find the Spice Vendor diary. We will learn much more about him.
