[Bf-committers] Blender Roadmap for engineering and robotics

[Herman Bruyninckx]

On Thu, 31 May 2007, Ton Roosendaal wrote:

> It's quite a long document, with a whole lot of very useful ideas in
> it, but also a bit shattered... at least from my perspective. :)
It is, I know! The document is meant to stimulate discussion among
roboticists, and is not yet ready for being used as a concrete roadmap for
adding to Blender...

> Robotics is not something I'm very familiar with, but I do realize most
> of your requirements suit traditional (character) animation well too.
Indeed, I think too!

> Note: We had a similar piece of work from Roland Hess about character
> animation. And we have people to work on Blender rigid body tools
> soon... so it's really a topic we have to look at.
>
> At this very moment I cannot contribute much to this, apart from trying
> to get things in motion, and trying to define some focus.
>
> Focus:
>
> - We need a "grand design" concept, how all of this ties together
Yes!

> - We need small steps to get into this grand design... 
Yes!

> for example, a
> project called "Time Refactor" to unify use of time in Blender, and
> bring back in control. Plenty of such smaller projects can be defined
> and scheduled.
>
> Get things in motion:
>
> - We could use an organization model like we did for Orange (Elephants
> Dream), and assign the team to develop and use parts of this
> development. I really hope we can include animation improvement targets
> for an OpenMovie 2.
> - Herman: the list of participants/targets you've defined in your paper
> looks like an excellent candidate for EU sponsored work. Did you
> consider to build an FP7 consortium?

I did, and still do! And I am looking for the right Call, but haven't found
it yet... Do you have concrete suggestions in this direction?


> - Herman: alternatively, do you think there would be a budget to get a
> couple of developers together (organized by Blender Foundation) to
> achieve specific robots coding tasks? I'm pretty sure we can combine
> this with creative content somehow... or I try to find artists (and art
> money) for a combination of 3D software + real life robots + art!
>
The first goal of the roadmap document was to ask sponsoring from EURON
(the European robotics research network, www.euron.org) with the goal of
organizing such meetings. The sponsoring would (if approved) be limited to
15.000 EUR, only available to EURON members.

I will have two master students next year that will work on some parts of
the "roadmap".

Herman

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