This year Google has been especially generous to Blender. We have the privilege of mentoring 17 students.
Some will be familiar faces from the Blender coding community, others are relatively new to the blender code base.
The talents of these students will be put to use all across the Blender core tool set as well as offering some exciting improvements and additions.
Mesh Editing/Retopology – Dan Walters was selected to implemented a number of new retopology tools and to polish existing mesh tools he will be mentored by Joe Eager (joeedh).
Sculpt/Paint – Jason Wilkins who worked on Blenders sculpt tools last year is returning to both further improve the sculpt tools as well as port many of the brushes and tools to our other paint modes, he will be mentored by Tom Musgrove (LetterRip).
UV Unwrapping – Shuvro Sarker was selected to implement some improvements to our uv tools. This was perhaps the toughest of the decisions since we had 5 excellent UV tool proposals this year. Andrea Weikert (elubie) will be mentoring Shuvro.
Weighting Tools – Jason Hays was selected to implement skin weighting tool improvements. He will be mentored by Campbell Barton.
UV/Paint Tools – Riakiotakis Antonis was selected to implement additional uv tool and painting tool improvements as well as possibly some additional weighting tools. He will also be mentored by Tom Musgrove.
Animation System Polish – Joshua Leung will be doing animation tool polishing addressing a number of issues to our star animators have identified as issues with Blender. He will be comentored by Bassam Kurdali (one of our talented animators) and Ton Roosendaal.
Motion Capture Tools -Benjamin Cook will implement a number of tools necessary for working with motion capture data including things like footskate cleanup. Campbell Barton (ideasman_42) will be mentoring.
Fluid Simulation Improvements – Christopher Neal will be working to implement some of Nils recent papers into our fluid simulator. He will be mentored by Daniel Genrich (Genscher)
Camera Tracker Integration – Sergey Sharybin will design interfaces and other tools for integrating the camera tracking library libmv for 2D and 3D matchmoving, camera tracking, and camera stabilization. Ton Roosendaal will be mentoring.
Camera Tracker library improvements – Matthias Fauconneau will work on additional features for the libmv library so that it can fully meet Blenders camera tracking needs. Julien Michot, one of the main developers of libmv will be mentoring.
Improved Internationalization and Localization – Xiao Xiangquan will be working to improve Blenders abilities to work with translated text for our tools so that they can be better used by an international audience. Xiao will be mentored by Kent Mein (sirdude)
Nodes for the GE logic – Sven von Brand will work on nodifying our game logic system. This project will be mentored by Benoit Bolsee (ben2610)
BGE Animation improvements – Mitchell Stokes will improve the game engines handling of blender animation data for character animation and will be comentored by Dalai Felinto (dfelinto) and Benoit Bolsee (benoit)
BGE bugfixing and polishing – Daniel Stokes will work on bug fixing and assorted minor tools and polishing for the game engine. He will be mentored by Dalai Felinto (dfelinto)
Collada – Prabhath Jayathilake will improve Blenders Collada support for animation and will be mentored by Nathan Letwory (jesterking)
3D Audio – Joerg Mueller will bring 3D audio tools for our animators and will be mentored by Martin Porier (theeth)
Dynamic Paint – Miika Hämäläinen will work on improving his dynamic paint tool work-flow and will be mentored by Janne Karhu (jahka)
We would like to thank the many students who applied this year. We received a number of excellent proposals – many of them for the same areas including UV tools and Collada – which made for some difficult choices, with the number of excellent proposals being much greater than the number of slots available.
We are thrilled to see so much interest in Blender and would encourage students to get involved in Blender development outside of GSoC.
Basically all the projects I wanted the most are in the list. And there are some awesome bosus :)
Great,
I love ones related to Matchmoving and Cameratracking!
I always felt the need for them in free software world, nice job!
Congrats to everyone!
Just read through the whole list and was very excited to see Ton mentoring on the Camera Tracker integration. We’ve been moving more and more tasks over to blender as we work on different productions,This could make AE a secondary tool this year.
Woah, everything will be in Polish? :)
Sounds good
All these ideas are great! I hope they all get finished and into the trunk.
wow, really really awesome, i’m looking forward to all of these improvements but i have a soft spot for the uv unwrapping, i still can’t use blender for this… i’m excited ;) congrats to all
It’s amazing! Lot of improvements in BGE and Camera Tracking! Can’t wait to see the results!!!!
Amazing!
Can’t wait for tracking :)
Whoops! Forgot to thank the mentors from the BF as well!
Great news! Thanks go out to Google and the students (those who were selected as well as those who applied)
Very, very good!
I’m very excited with this announcement!
I’ll wait anxious for this improvements!
Congratulations and thanks to the Blender coders!
Erm, “asesome” should be “awesome” in my comment above. *embarrassed!*
Sweet Lordy. Brecht returns. Nodal material system. Realtime updating GI renderer in the works and now GSoC projects for MoCap, camera tracking, GE nodal logic, dynamic paint and 12 other asesome projects?! Blender is becoming a MONSTER of awesome! Great to see both the Game Engine and integrating with live footage getting a lot of love. After all, these are the two fastest growing areas of CG. Blender FTW! Now I just pray that my favourites make it to the finish line. Lesson from previous GSoC’s – students: talk to the community and your mentors EARLY and OFTEN to win!
Not integrated project is not finished project imho…
Good luck anyway !! :)
I was discussing the GSoC project list with some other GSoC students for GIMP (on the GIMP irc) yesterday, when suddenly someone said something like “Wow – Blender has 17 projects!”. Many congrats for the entire Blender team – this an amazing achievement. I’m a regular user of Blender and I’m very happy to hear this :D
Good luck to all the GSoC students and Mentors! Let’s hope that all projects to be integrated quickly and won’t sit in different branches long periods ;)
SWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET!!!!!! thats all I have to say.
Still no optimization for material and texture nodes system?
Really hope the camera tracking ones get done. That’d be very useful for me. I usually use a tripod if I want to have CG in a scene and that’s not preferable.
I can’t wait to see what these folks can come up with! :)
ton mentoring the camera tracking.. that’s a huge opportunity!
neXyon is among the students, so at least one project will be finished for sure :P
Well, Im a bit dissapointed that there will be no inferred rendering in this year´s GSoC. But otherwise, it´s all great stuff, good luck.
Yeah, that’s amazing. Just a few days ago I had to work with Motion Tracking and I rally think that this projects will bring a huge improvement for this!
@DAVIS I thought the exact same thing… Well even if only half get finished that is still some major work to get it all into trunk. Still congrats to the successful applicants, and to those who missed out, a bow of respect to you for your hard work anyway. There is always a lot of background work to research and make the application that no one sees.
Respect
Awesome! It seems BGE will finally get some lovin’
Wow… That’s an amazing list of proposals! How will they ever manage to merge it all! :P
Congrats to all the students for this year! This is a very grt beginning and looking forward your grt jobs! :)
Cheers,
Great news!! Hopin that at least a few(if not all!) of these make it into trunk in some form.
WTH !!
awesome list! :D
Nodes for the GE logic – Sven von Brand. I REALLY love it!!
BGE bugfixing and polishing – Daniel Stokes. No inferred rendering?
Congrats to all who were accepted, should be a very exciting Summer of code. btw which paper of nils, thin features or surface tension?
once again congrats to all accepted students
wow…this is awesome!
my personal favorite are:
Nodes for the GE logic – Sven von Brand
Dynamic Paint – Miika
Congrats and 1k thanks to @all
Congratulations to everyone :)
This year is really exiting to say the least.
Imbusy,
your proposal was excellent, however we happened to have five UV tool proposals and could only pick just one :)
It’s sad I didn’t get accepted but it’s probably my fault for targeting UV tools anyway :). Good luck to the summer students!
Improvements and polish of the tools are great. But why no improvements to the UI? There was boasts of the 2.5 UI being new and improved. But in all honesty, its the exact same UI as 2.4, just with a different theme.
A material manager would be useful – kind of a whole new window that allows you to view all materials used in the scene, with a thumbnail of what the material looks like. Also the ability to peruse other blend files to see what materials are in those.
A similar system for viewing textures available, along with those used in materials and those just loaded in the scene.
Woha… Above expectation!
@SIMON Quoted in total agreement!
This is totally amazing, I’m left wondering if this is all just a very vivid day dream of mine..?!!
Sure hope not! :D
Now I’m waiting for the wiki pages to go up, very interested in the improved UV, weighting and texture painting tools.
Wow I really like many of the projects! This will be fruitfull year for Blender’s development! Congrats to students who got accepted!
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