Greetings from #rdcHQ! The somewhat misleadingly labeled “Blender Basics” Track is blazing through the Blender Manual. In very short order, basic modeling concepts have been mastered and completely original 3-dimensional avatars are being created.

RDC Veteran Nathan Malamud posts a progress report from the field —

MileMarker 39: Model A 3-Dimensional Scene

For a start, Quince N. and Nathan Malamud (led by mentor Jerry McManus) decided to create a house and tree with textures. You can get textures off the Internet and then post it onto your character, like fur or scales. One picture shows the house with textures, and the other, shows it without.

The tree at right came from an online 3D library.

MileMarker 40: Create An Original 3D Character

After that Nathan Malamud decided to go crazy. Cracking out of the desert ground comes the SCALY EYE MONSTER. For the scales, a texture was used, then Jerry taught Nathan about bump mapping, which makes the scales seem like scales instead of a flat picture.

Stay tuned for more news from the totally amazing Cobwebs Crew …

MileMarker 36: Understanding The Symbols

Greetings from #rdcHQ! We have been so busy in our Codes of the World track that there has been little time to create tutorial videos … however, we are pleased to announce that Nathan Malamud has created his third video in his MathML tutorial series: “Understanding Operators and Symbols.” …

The word from the editing room is that a fourth episode is most definitely planned and eventually the videos will be compiled into a larger film to give folks a better idea of all of the cool things that happen at Rural Design Collective Headquarters (#rdcHQ). It is impossible to keep tabs on it all – but we most certainly try!

MileMarker 37: Create A Limited Edition Poster!

In other MathML news – we will be creating a limited edition run of our MathML Poster for our Rural Design Collective Launch Party happening Labor Day Weekend.

{~beaux libre*} MathML Poster by Rebecca Hargrave Malamud and the The Rural Design Collective

We’ll have a lot to celebrate … Stay Tuned!

Greetings from #rdcHQ! This week, we take a break from all of the action to announce The Oregon Coast Film Festival which will take place in Bandon, OR on October 12, 2013! The Cobwebs Crew will be entering the scenes created this summer from Cobwebs – The Movie and the RDC will enter footage from “The Beginning of the Sustainable World” as well.

The deadline for submissions is September 15, 2013. Enter your own video creations!

Also, Be sure to keep an eye out for news of the Rural Design Collective Launch Party happening this Labor Day Weekend, however our art show will be postponed due to a very big announcement coming soon. Stay tuned …

Greetings from #rdcHQ! This week during Cobwebs College the amazing Gabby McCutcheon built her home page design entirely in HTML, CSS and SVG. The navigational spider is now fully functional, and we now have an informational section to tell more about the website. She’ll be adding interactivity soon including a navigational bar on the rest of the pages.

MileMarker 33: Layout and Code The Home Page!

Snapshot of the Cobwebs Sandbox currently in progress – Layout by Gabby McCutcheon

MileMarker 34: Build A 3D Background

Animation Mentor Jerry McManus and Nate Malamud built a 3D scene entirely in Blender in one session. Nate reports below:

“Today, Nathan Malamud and Jerry McManus explored the wonderful world of Blender. They learned about how to add textures like wooden tiling to objects, explored the different types of light, and using the knife tool to cut holes in the walls. Below is the scene … Work In Progress!”

3D Work by Nathan Malamud and RDC Mentor Jerry McManus.

MileMarker 35: Learn How To Read Code

Our Gamemeister Albert Self III learned a bit about how coders communicate and document their work in today’s game development session. While looking into more ways we can customize our version of Capman, we discovered the wonderful world of comments in our current codebase by the clever Francesco Cottone.

Any coder that goes to such lengths as to faithfully reconstruct the following maze entirely in ASCII art deserves a little recognition and mad props!

You can see all of the code yourself if you view the source. Look for the developer’s comments after the double slash (//) …

// Hello! If you're thinking that the "Capman" demo was the easier...
// you're wrong   Well... at least is the most documented. So, let's
// travel between the "capman"'s code. I'll be quite informal ...
// forgive me!

// Ow! First of all, play capman a bit, paying attention on what
// happens on the screen: how ghosts moves, how capman is
// controlled etc. Done? Ok. Let's go.

We’re having a lot of fun learning about code the open source way – and we have also learned that Albert has a really cool extra credit project that he has been working on himself … Stay tuned!