GSOC 2011 Announced!

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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This Years gsoc projects have been announced here:
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2011/blender

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 mentored by Dalai Felinto (dfelinto)

BGE bugfixing and polishing – Daniel Stokes will work on bug fixing and assorted minor tools and polishing for the game engine. He will be comentored by Dalai Felinto (dfelinto) and Benoit Bolsee (benoit)

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)

edit:
posted the list from code.blender.org instead (guess that one is more correct)

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17 students!

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2011/ 12 sound very promising for Blender, very promising indeed.

Good luck to all of the students & mentors, I think I can safely assume the entire community will look forward to the fruits that these projects will bare.

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game nodes! sweet — so many good things that will come. hopefully now when blender is stabalizing 2.5X they can integrate faster :slight_smile:

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17, that is great! for those with poor memory (like me, had to look it up) blender got 10 last year. is there more detailed project descriptions available yet or have they not been published?

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Now people can’t complain. We even have our very own BMesh related project this year :D! Can’t wait to see all the UV and sculpt improvements :)! I’m also very excited to see now fluid sim features!

Now I just wish we could read all the proposal from the students!

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Seems like great mix of projects and students. Both improvements and new functionally projects, both new faces and experienced blender developers.

What a “merge nightmare” that awaits the devs :slight_smile: 2010 + 2011 gsoc projects + bmesh, nodes, freestyle…

I think that it’s Nils tension surface & thin fluid paper from 2010 he is about to implement:
http://graphics.ethz.ch/~thuereyn/ntoken3/pubs.html

quite a challenge :slight_smile:

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please add relax,smooth to UV’s.

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Did the BGE’s differed lighting get in???
Ex.

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That was Daniel Stokes proposal, his has been accepted as gsoc student, but unless the deferred lightning is included in the “polishing” part of his project i think his been assigned another project…

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like ctrl+v? or is that a different algorithm than what you mean…???

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I wish the best of luck to students and mentors

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His orignal proposal was for inferred lighting (not defferred, which is a different method). However, it was deemed too risky a proposal and thus he refocused to do smaller features and bug fixing.

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I know opinions may differ on that part of what he chose to do instead, but I think it is a good thing to see the existing parts of the BGE become more useful, more usable, more powerful, and more polished as inferred lighting wouldn’t be a critical feature needed for complex game creation.

That being, that these GSoC projects and the current pending features look like they will go a long way towards addressing the biggest issues preventing some developers from seeing the BGE as a serious tool that can get the job, even large ones, done. After most of the potential design and flexibility roadblocks are removed then it would be nice to see the implementation of fancy technology like inferred lighting.

On the topic itself, this looks to be a great summer for Blender as there’s something for just about every type of user who uses Blender for a different range of tasks.

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Paint gets a lot of attention :slight_smile: woohoo!

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Excellent stuff! So many projects, all working on so many different parts of Blender, this is going to be an exciting summer. Congratulations to all accepted students.