[Bf-committers] Interest in GSoC 2010 topics: 1. "Integrate PTex texture mapping library" 2. "Unit tests"

[Konrad Wilhelm Kleine]

Hello to you all,

my name is Konrad Kleine (nickname: kwk) and I am interested in these
two GSoC topics:

1. Integrate Ptex texture mapping library
2. Unit tests

I was wondering if anybody has expressed interest in these topics. I
certainly do have interest since texturing and multi-res geometry are
exactly the things that I want to tackle. Ptex is new to me, I admit,
but I looked into the source code and documentation and find it very
well documented and usable. I understand most of the targets for Ptex
and a lot of the technical realization. To be honest, I don't know
Blender's new BMesh very well. I would definitively need some time to
take a look at it, since I believe that Multi-Res texturing will somehow
be related to BMesh, right?

Why did I also pick the second project "Unit tests"? Well, since I
certainly think that there are a number of applicants for the Ptex
project I see "Unit tests" as an anchor option. I have done a lot of
projects with CMake, including my Diploma thesis and MoneyPenny
(http://www3.fh-swf.de/fbin/roth/money-penny_en.htm). Therefore I have a
substantial background in writing CMakeLists.txt files. I think that
unit test on the other hand using CMake's counterpart CTest are a great
way to improve development and to find new developers. Since unit tests
are a small piece of software most of the time, they are therefore
(hopefully) easier to grasp for new developers.

I'm a Master student of "Computer Vision & Computational Intelligence"
in Germany and have got a Diploma in Computer Science from the
University of Applied Science in Iserlohn. I currently live in Spain for
a half year with my girlfriend, trying to learn Spanish and looking
forward to a short internship.

I have a strong background in using and writing open source software and
working for companies that produce and distribute open source software.
Among them are most recently GONICUS and Trolltech (now Nokia). Over the
years I've gathered an in-depth experience in software development with
C, C++, Python Qt and OpenGL in multi-platform environments. I hope this
qualifies me at least from a technical standpoint.

I've been into graphics programming since I started my studies back in
2004 and Blender has always been inspiring me. OK, well sometimes it was
frustrating when I saw thing I wasn't been able to do for myself ;) I
have to admit that I'm not that much of an artist but I'm passionate
about graphics and music in general.

I'm nearly done with my studies and somehow see Blender GSoC as a chance
to seriously get into the graphics industry. I also hope that by doing
GSoC I'll gain a deeper insight in the Blender developing process and be
able to help developing Blender in the future. I hope that I get the
idea behind GSoC right, because I believe that it's all about finding
new people to work on the project for longer than a period of six month
or so.

If you want to know more about previous projects I've been working on
you can have a look these academic research topics or projects:

Classification of facial expressions within video streams
=========================================================
My most recent student project is as said the classification of facial
expressions within video streams based on an artificial neural network
(ANN) and numerous computer vision algorithms. For more information,
please visit: http://code.google.com/p/klucv2/

Multi-Touch-Display
===================
as part of my Computer Vision 1 course, a fellow student and I
constructed a multi-touch display based on Jeff Han's paper Multi-Touch
Sensing through Frustrated Total Internal Reflection. As a proof of
concept we implemented a photo application using OpenCV for image-based
input detection and OpenGL for visualization.

GPUANN
======
in a team of 4 people I was responsible for the implementation and
design of an application framework to train and execute artificial
neural networks (ANN) on NVIDIA graphic cards using the CUDA technology.
The training and propagation algorithm had to scale according to the
size of a network. The networks themselves were stored as XML files that
were validated formally as well as logically by the application framework.

QBIC – Play Smart!
==================
is basically a "four in a row" board game, except that you can place
your tokens on 16 sticks. This way you can connect four tokens in 3D
space and no longer on a 2D plane. The game was a final examination of
three of my fellow students and me. We used OGRE as our graphics engine
and many other open source components. For more information, please
visit: http://sourceforge.net/projects/qbic/

ASURO
=====
a fellow student and I assembled and programmed the ASURO robot with a
fast yet robust path-finding algorithm.

Blender Classes
===============
I offered various Blender classes on 3D modelling, texturing, shading
and animation.

Thanks in advance for doing GSoC and giving me and other students the
opportunity to apply for the all inspiring Blender project!

I look forward to hearing from you!

Kind regards
  - Konrad