Happy new year folks !!

Zombbit = zombie + rabbit
I don't know if it's a real dead rabbit ; it looks more like a stuffed rabbit. But who cares ?! :) It jump on its enemies with its huge knife. Like zombies (and stuffed toys !), it doesn't like fire, but it is not afraid of blades.

A terrifying creature came from darkness : a worm ! It launches its darkness spells with its hypnotic dance. Its enemy is the dragonfry (because it's a creature of light of course).

In the same week, Inkscape 0.47 and Blender 2.50 alpha 0 are released. Woot !
The new Blender seems really great ; I have to rewrite my scripts for it.
The new Inkscape is cool too. Years ago, I created a font for ToaD with Gimp, Inkscape and FontForge. The new Inkscape is better to create font : I'll try this by creating a second font for ToaD. Here the old ToaD font :

His best friend is his sword.He lives to fight against the strongest possible enemies. In short, a formidable soldier !

It's a small, pink and winged creature which looks stupid ! But it's also a real living weapon, because it can spit a powerful light ray. Try to keep your dragonfry alive, and it will destroy your worst enemies.

I think that this goblin will die soon !

The carniflex is actually a carnivorous plant which can move. It can bit of course, but also use plant magic, like make grow a plant tentacle. It will have the power to regenerate by planting in the ground.

This time I've also made a render with the subsurf (subdivision surface) modifier activated in Blender ; I hope we'll have in the future a shader than can do the same thing in real-time, in order to have scalable textures and models.

The pigoceros is the unlikely combination of a unicorn and a pig. For now it can only hit with its huge horn. But in the future it can throw lightning too, and another creature can ride it. Oh, it has a very bad temper !!

In The ToaD universe, the triton is a kind of anthropomorphic frog. So it's a good creature to introduce water magic in the game ; indeed the triton can already spit bubbles on its enemies. But it's not a wizard, it's a soldier with special powers. It has a trident, and it could hit with its tongue too. It will be a good versatile fighter in an army.

The last time, we've seen how we can duplicate and move objects in order to draw seamless textures, ready to be mapped on a 3D plane for example. When you duplicate border objects, these object can use all the features of vector graphics : circle, box, Bezier curves, gradients, gaussian blur. But there is another way to draw perfectly seamless vector textures without duplication.The secret is using only vertical and horizontal lines. In Inkscape, press the Control key with the pen tool (Shift+F6) to draw horizontal or vertical straight lines. You can use rectangles instead of the straight lines.

Using only vertical/horizontal straight lines would be very frustrating for an artist. Fortunately we can draw more complex things.

1) Only the borders matter : so you can deform your objects in the middle of the picture.

2) You can use gradients ; but they must be only horizontal and vertical (once again, use the Control key with the gradient controllers). For example, if your object crosses the right and left borders, your gradient has to be vertical (or if the gradient is horizontal, the start color and the end color have to be the same).

3) You can add a blur effect on your horizontal/vertical lines/rectangles. Beware, an object with a blur has to be larger than the page : the parts of the object out of the page must be larger than the blur range.

Of course, all this tips work also with a sub-part of a complex texture which is UV-mapped on a part of a 3D model.