Design: July 2006 Archive Page

--Blender Basics, 2nd Ed (pdf) (Central Dauphin High School)

Where was this book during the last 3 weeks when I was struggling with random half-finished tutorials?

Thank you, James Chronister!

RideMax is a computer software program guaranteed to help you save time waiting in line at Walt Disney World and Disneyland.

RideMax allows you to specify the attractions you wish to ride during your visit, then uses a sophisticated scheduling algorithm to order your attractions so that the amount of time you spend in line is minimized. --Experience Disney Without the Long Wait! (ridemax.com)

What a great niche market! A classic entrepreneurial example of finding a void, turning it into a need, and filling it.

Thanks for another great suggestion, Rosemary.

--Blender for the Faint Hearted -- 06: Material Basics, Part 2 (SciFi Meshes)

I've been working with the open source 3D design tool "Blender." It's powerful. Very powerful. It's got an overwhelming number of buttons, and the existing documentation is incomplete.

I have asked Seton Hill to purchase a handful of copies of a professional 3D design tool, but even the student copies of that cost hundreds of dollars, so I'm not asking my New Media Projects students to shell out that much money.

I've just spent hours trying to figure out how to create multiple materials that are attached to a single object. Right now I'm working on a chair, and I want the base to be one color and the cushion to be a different color. Actually, "color" isn't the right term -- I want the base to be hard plastic and the cushions to be shiny leather. This means that, instead of just determining the color, I'm also determining the glossiness of the surface. If I wanted to create transparent or reflective objects, I can do that, too.

By clicking buttons at random, I managed to create several different materials for a project I've been working on last week, but at the time I really didn't know what I was doing, and I couldn't reproduce what I did when I tried just now.

At any rate, this tutorial expalains what I was trying to do.

I'm a strong supporter of open source software. The Blender Foundation is fully aware that people find its software bewildering and its documentation incomplete. The "Summer of Documentation" is a project designed to tackle that -- experienced Blender users are writing tutorials to fill the gaps. I'm looking forward to reading those tutorials as they come out, but unfortunately for me I've got the time now, and won't have much time to learn Blender once the semester starts.

I do plan to contribute to the existing wiki documentation, so that others will benefit from my struggle.

I do wish there were an "easy mode" interface that turned off features that newbies won't need... and then maybe the documentation could tell you which features to activate as you progress through the tutorials and need access to more powerful features. But it's also probably fair to say that most users of Blender probably have significant computing experience. They won't be thinking of writing comprehensive tutorials for non-programmers.

Ah, well. Back to work.

--Muppet Wiki  (Muppet.Wikia.com)

Too much information on the muppets. Way, way too much.

--Troy Sterling and the Active and Passive Verbs (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I created this with Impress, the Open Office slideshow presenter, and exported it as a Shockwave file. I'm amazed at how tiny the resulting file is. It looks like a few effects didn't make the transition, but they were just eye candy.

I designed this as a simple linear slide show, for me to present in the front of the room. In this online version, all you can do is click to advance to the next page. It should at least have multiple-choice questions, in order to ensure that a bored reader isn't just clicking through on autopilot. (At any rate, it's more entertaining than my more traditional online guide to Active and Passive Verbs.)

This is just a bit of practice, as I continue to experiment with various media production tools.

I've also downloaded Jahshaka, an open-source video editing tool, but it crashed on my little wimpy laptop. I'll try it again when I get some time at the office.

Looking at the last two semesters taught by the author before the text adventure game and the most recent two semesters, every measure of student satisfaction is better. The only measure that might be troubling is perceived student workload.

This project is very large. Even with high-level architectural design and many useful snippets of code presented in class lectures, students work very hard in this course. The amount of work and new material requires a considerable time commitment from the instructor for office hours and other outside-class contact time. It also requires the selection of a good teaching assistant to provide additional time for questions to be answered. We are examining using a Wiki or similar shared editing space to assist students in asking, answering, and finding previous answers of questions; the efficacy of such a system is pure speculation at this point.

The integration of writing, oral presentation, program design, and coding makes this course a fantastic introduction to software engineering. This helps to overcome students? tendency to compartmentalize, thinking writing is for English class, coding is for computer science, and never the twain shall meet. --Brian C. Ladd --The Curse of Monkey Island: Holding the Attention of Students Weaned on Computer Games (Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges)

Fascinating article on a computer science course that uses a text-adventure project as a way of meeting liberal arts curriculum demands.

I was a huge fan of Lucasarts' adventure games (Loom, The Monkey Islands and so on), and the fact that they were primarily word driven. There were graphics - and what graphics! - but for the most part they presented the player with an interesting dichotomy - nothing ever really happened, but you were responsible for it all. You would chat to somebody who would tell you that they wanted a compass, for example, and it was up to you to get that compass. Only, they would never just say "Get me the compass". Instead, it would be a conversation that could take up to twenty minutes, where you found out about the character's history, family, likes and dislikes, and, above all, the reason for them wanting the compass in the first place. --The Encyclopedia Frobozzica (Progression: Following Myself)

A well-done personal reflection on the graphical adventure genre.