Third of the serie about Monsters of MountyHall. This one is the favorite dessert of the Troll who hunts in the Hall. As the game is not serious at all, how this image could be serious itself? I had to put a face on the jelly cube, and SpongeBob SquarePants was definitely the right choice.
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Sunday, August 8 2010
By Olivier Saraja on Sunday, August 8 2010, 22:34 - 2D Drawing
Gelatineous Cube - Speed Painting for MountyHall
Thursday, August 5 2010
By Olivier Saraja on Thursday, August 5 2010, 14:11 - 2D Drawing
Raquettou - Speed Painting for MountyHall
Second of the serie about Monsters of MountyHall. This one wanders the Hall, collects and then eats all the gold coins abandoned by the trolls adventurers.
He is cunning and dreadful when needed. These monsters are somehow inspired by the Beagle Brats from Disney, hence the colorful tribute and the famous 176-671 prisoner number!
Tuesday, August 3 2010
By Olivier Saraja on Tuesday, August 3 2010, 22:25 - 2D Drawing
Necromancer - Speed Painting for MountyHall
MountyHall is a web based RPG, where people play trolls who wander in the subterranean caves, hunting monsters in order to eat them or to plunder their treasures. A quite funny and absolutely not serious game.
As I would like to improve my digital painting pseudo-skills, I decided to give an hand and to provide images for some monsters that don't have any at all. Here comes the Necromancer!
Friday, July 23 2010
By Olivier Saraja on Friday, July 23 2010, 19:57 - 2D Drawing
Melusine - Female spirit of fresh waters
Sunday, July 18 2010
Abandoned WIP: Elder Thing (Cthulhu Mythos)
A tribute to Howard Philip Lovecraft (that I always found fascinating, even though I was never was fond of his style), here is the WIP of an Elder Thing, featuring in his novel titled The Dreams in the Witch-House.
Last image:
Update: some 4 years later, I found back a blend file that survived. Nothing fancy, not even finished, but I'm pleased to attach it to this blog post. It is under Blender Artistic Licence, and I hope that you may come up with interesting things thanks to this model! ;-)
Saturday, July 17 2010
By olivS on Saturday, July 17 2010, 17:15 - Blender tutorials
Vector Blur usage with Blender
Vector Blur is an interesting solution to go beyond the limitations of regular Motion Blur. It relies on the Composite Nodes Editor to perform. But even if the Nodes Editor could look intimidating at first glance, it's in fact very easy to set up. This short tutorial will go through the basics steps for enhancing your renders (both stills and animations) with good looking motion blur.
Thanks to Vector Blur, the red sphere stays in focus almost all time, but the background gets blurred because of the camera movement.
For Blender: 2.50 Alpha 2 and better
Friday, July 16 2010
By olivS on Friday, July 16 2010, 12:53 - Blender tutorials
Your first simple animation, step by step
Making animations can sound very intimidating, but it is often easy, even for beginers to make their very first animation without great harassment. This tutorial is there to show you how to do it.
For Blender: 2.50 Alpha 2 and better
Saturday, July 10 2010
By olivS on Saturday, July 10 2010, 19:45 - Blender tutorials
Ambient Occlusion and Indirect Lighting
Global illumination is a very popular method for lighting three dimensional scenes. Unfortunately, most of the methods are very slow and requires lots of ressources. Ambient Occlusion is a method for simulating global illumination, while keeping a respectable ratio between results and computing times.
For Blender: 2.50 Alpha 2 and better
Thursday, July 8 2010
By olivS on Thursday, July 8 2010, 19:55 - Blender tutorials
Using texture and material stencils
Stencil is one of the most useful tip when you want to control finely the way the shader changes from one texture to another, on the same object, and with the use of a single material index.

And thanks to the Nodes editor, it is also possible to use stencils with materials, for ever more complex materials and textures setups, that may rely on stencil themselves!.
For Blender: 2.50Alpha 2 and better
Wednesday, July 7 2010
By Olivier Saraja on Wednesday, July 7 2010, 13:04 - 2D Drawing
Configuring Gimp for pen tablets (like Wacom's Bamboo Fun)
Hopefully, you now have a working tablet. It is time for you to configure your favorite painting software so that you may work with both the pen and the software, the most efficient way that you see fit. This short article is about configuring Gimp in order to achieve a comfortable setup that will ease your painting workflow.
Image courtesy of David Revoy, for Sintel Open Movie (Durian Project)
For Gimp: 2.6.8 or better
Sunday, June 27 2010
By Olivier Saraja on Sunday, June 27 2010, 23:16 - 3D gallery
Indirect lighting test with Blender 2.50 Alpha 2
Indirect Lighting with Blender. You would need Blender 2.50 Alpha 2 or better in order to reproduce such results.
Monday, June 21 2010
By olivS on Monday, June 21 2010, 22:45 - Blender tutorials
Soft shadows and Area lights
Blender is able to produce soft shadows from any of its main lamps, quite easily. But we would still have to deal with the main usage for area lights (in order to answer to a very frequently asked question by many beginners), that is achieving shadows with soft borders, useful for simulating the lighting of a supermarket, a computer screen or a cloudy outdoor.
This article shows the usage of soft shadows, and then of the Area ligths whose settings are sometimes difficult to master.
For Blender: 2.50 Alpha 2 or better
Monday, June 14 2010
By olivS on Monday, June 14 2010, 15:19 - Blender tutorials
Transparent objects and Blender
Transparency and light refraction within a transparent material are key parameters in order to get a realistic rendering of a material like solid glass. This tutorial doesn't help with getting caustic spots, which is beyond the reach of the actual version of Blender without using an external renderer like Yafaray or Luxrender.
Sunday, June 13 2010
By olivS on Sunday, June 13 2010, 15:12 - Blender tutorials
Reflections, Gloss and Fresnel effects
In the past, Blender used EnvMaps (environmental maps) in order to simulate the reflectiveness of objects. But this way was quite difficult, needing the use of Empties (null objects) and layers when a simple reflecting plane was needed. Fortunately, including Raytracing into the renderer eased the whole process and helped to achieve a greater realism.
Fresnel effect demonstration - pay attention to the ground reflections
For Blender: 2.50 Alpha 2 or better
Saturday, June 12 2010
By olivS on Saturday, June 12 2010, 20:50 - Blender tutorials
Making a rain (or snow) effect
Simulating rain for still images or for animation is a frequent topic from beginners. This tutorial will try to show a simple way for getting good looking results, while using very basic materials and modeled geometries.
Simulate rain using particles, proof of concept
Simulate falling snowflakes using particles, proof of concept
For Blender: 2.50 Alpha 2 or better
Wednesday, June 9 2010
By olivS on Wednesday, June 9 2010, 00:02 - Blender tutorials
Material indices
This short tutorial aims at showing you how to give many different materials to the same mesh.
Obviously, even if for the sake of simplicity, we use in this tutorial only materials with plain diffuse colors, the materials can be textured or combined through the Material nodes as per the needs of the artist.
Using these techniques, you can virtually assign one different material per mesh face during the shading process, and do smart faces selections during the modeling process.
For Blender: 2.50 Alpha 2 or better
Friday, June 4 2010
By olivS on Friday, June 4 2010, 09:42 - 2D Drawing
Kharr Trollarfeld
Well, yet another 2D drawing. More a portrait, this time, but somehow a character concept anyway. Let me introduce you to Kharr Trollarfeld, a freaky, but classy, vampire-troll. Any likelyness to any living, non living, or undead people is purely intended.
Sunday, May 30 2010
By olivS on Sunday, May 30 2010, 09:51 - 2D Drawing
Trolless - Guardian of the... huh... Quiche!
There was a long time I wanted to buy a decent graphic tablet. After having a mediocre experience with a Trust 1200 Wireless (aiptek driver) tablet I decided to give a go to the renowned Wacom Bamboo Fun & Touch. I had to recompile the module (same in french here) before using it on my Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx, but it was almost painless.
Please click to view at full size

I'm also a lucky friend of David Revoy, and he made me a gift: his DVD training Chaos & Evolutions, released by the Blender Foundation. I really enjoyed the video tutorials, because they cover everything I'm lacking. Since my childhood, I always made a lot of drawings, mainly drafts without techniques at all, and I never managed to get to the color stage. By playing this DVD, it was almost compulsatory that I'd try again.''

Please click to discover the content and buy the DVD from the Blender Foundation
Saturday, May 22 2010
By olivS on Saturday, May 22 2010, 17:24 - Blender news
Blender 2.49 Scripting by Michel Anders
A new book about Blender has been released by Packt Publishing. Now it is time for the scripting with your favorite 3D app to be unveiled. The cover proposes the reader to "Extend the power and flexibility of Blender with the help of Python: a high-level, easy-to-learn scripting language. Let's see what is inside.
Tuesday, December 1 2009
By olivS on Tuesday, December 1 2009, 23:07 - Blender news
Blender 3D Incredible Machines, by Allan Brito
Allan Brito, author of the famous weblog Blender 3D Architect and of the Blender 3D Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery book did it again: he recently published a new book at Packt Publishing.
His new book is titled Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines. I should receive it soon, and I would be pleased to review it on this blog for your very pleasure. Before it happens, you can check the full table of content or the attached sample chapter, courtesy of the publisher.
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