The successful applicants of this year’s Google Summer of Code
student grants have been finalized!
This year, Blender received a total of 3 grants, and the successful
proposals were:
“Interactive sculpting with multi-resolution models”
by Nicholas Bishop (mentored by Jean-Luc Peurière)
“Modifier Stack Upgrade”
by Benjamin John Batt (mentored by Daniel Dunbar)
“Sky Generator”
by Dmitriy Mazovka (mentored by Kent Mein)
To the guys that applied but weren’t successful: I wish you the
best, and I wish there could have been summer grants for all of
you, as the quality of the proposals was amazingly high! (We
recieved a mere 26 proposals, and only rejected 6 of them.)
I’m proud of everybody that submitted a proposal.
To the successful candidates: in the next few days I will be
setting up a CVS repository and some mailinglists, and we can
get things started.
i think the number of grants depended on the number of proposals and mentors in some way. ogre got 6 grants with 57 proposals. blender got 3 grants with 26 proposals. 3 is somewhat sparse compared to last year but this year the number of mentoring organizations was much bigger.
what is the modifier stack upgrade about?
the sculpting and sky projects sound very interesting.
but i also hoped that the half-edge project takes part.
yeah too bad about the voxels and timmeh’s volumetric rendering… still I hadn’t heard about a sky generator yet, which sounds real nice!
Enjoy the summer guys/girls
1)The SharpC interactive modeling in Blender. Alright, sweet!
2)Skygenerator? Wow Awesome. I’ll start using some different skymaps once in a while
3)Modifier Stack Upgrade…no comments due to ignorance…(lol)
Well those 3 arnt that bad as a start. It’s too bad there wernt any more grants for projects but quality over quantity might turn out to be a good thing.
The success/failure ratio for Blender projects wasn’t worse than for other organizations. We just went from about 150 proposals last year to 26 now. Let’s hope some of the applicants decide to work on their projects anyway, there were just too many good proposals.
It looks like the granted projects are projects that already has a existing code base. Like sharp construct, the modifier stack. I’m not sure about the sky generator though. What makes a sky generator so special anyway? Wasn’t that already possible in Blender? Or does it involve more, like generating and animating realistic clouds or something?
I couldn’t find the list of proposal in the wiki. Does someone know where they are?
Anyway, the upcomming improvements in Blender will dwarf the other previous releases again. HE-meshes, cloth, SOC2006, Nodes, improved Elbeem etc etc etc.
Hi, wow, those are three very promising proposals! What I would also have liked to have seen are voxels, hair shaping tools and more improvements to the animation tools. I have a question about one of the proposals - it seems that N. Bishop will be integrating Multi-Resolution Meshes. I’ve read on blendernation:
Multi-Resolution Meshes (also known as MRM or Multi-Resolution Models) is a complicated technique allowing different regions of a mesh to be sub-surfaced by different amounts.
I thought like some others that you’d be able to store a SubD level, sort of like ZBrush, what I get from the quote above sounds more like the way that multi-resolution NURBS patches work.
I imagine the three accepted proposals will be put on the wiki in the coming weeks. The other proposals would require permission from the authors to publish, so I don’t think those will be made public.
The proposal seems to aim for an implementation similar to ZBrush. The quote from Blendernation is incorrect, it explains adaptive subdivision, not multiresolution. Adaptive subdivision is a nice extension to a multiresolution system, but it’s not part of the summer of code proposal, which is by itself already very ambitious. Last I checked, ZBrush didn’t have adaptive subdivision either.
Blendernation had a comment of people who could pitch in 5 euros (or dollars matching that), and have the Blender foundation give personal grants to other projects when there was enough.
I’m meaning they are giving 500 euros (which is quite a few more dollars) to anyone who gives a substantial addition to the docs.
The thing of having the Blender foundation fund aspiring coders would be that Ton himself would get to choose or he could set up a vote system for the users. He may not be able to fund all projects so we would have to prioritize.
As for people working on their projects anyway, let’s encourage them to do that, point them to coding resources and papers, get hands on training from seasoned coders ect…
First of all it is accurate physic-based simulation of skylight, sunlight and aerial perspective effects. With several tuning parameters it is intended to become a really good Blender’s feature. Secondly it is clouds. Additionally to available noise textures clouds based on cellular automata (CA) will be developed. All this can be stored as an environment map.
Creation of scene objects helping to construct lightning environment based on generated sky properties. It can be several light sources, possibly mesh objects. For example light shafts can be generated automatically basing on volumetric clouds (CA).
In perspective (and some points can be achieved in frames of the project) there is sky animation. Sun walking, clouds.
a bit like eeshlo’s project, but better integrated I guess (not bad at all!)
What I would also have liked to have seen are voxels, hair shaping tools and more improvements to the animation tools. I have a question about one of the proposals - it seems that N. Bishop will be integrating Multi-Resolution Meshes. I’ve read on blendernation: