[Bf-committers] Congratulations and welcome to this years GSoC students

[Tom M]

Congratulations to the accepted students!

This year we were able to accept the following projects

*Tool development* - Antonis Riakiotakis (Mentor: Sergey Sharybin)
This project aims to add various tools to blender, related to texturing
workflow. Tools include rake brushes for texture paint, separate alpha
masks for texture paint, maintain image tool, isomap based unwrapping.

*FBX Importer* - Alexander Gessler (Mentor: LetterRip)
FBX is a powerful file format most commonly used to interchange data
between Autodesk (tm) products. With its highly-developed pipeline it
offers a very efficient way of dealing with scene data, unfortunately,
being proprietary to Autodesk and by design accessible only by a SDK,
support in the Open Source world is rare. My proposal is to implement a FBX
importer for the Open Asset Import Library (assimp) and to embed assimp
into Blender, which will ultimatively give Blender FBX import support.

*Developing of modeling Tools: Bevel, Bridge, Boolean.* - Alexander Mokhov
(Mentor: Howard Trickey)
This project devoted to developing and improving of some modeling tools for
Blender.

*Mesh smoothing based on curvature flow operator in a diffusion equation.* -
Alexander Pinzon Fernandez (Mentor: Daneil Genrich)
Computer graphics objects reconstructed from real world contain undesirable
noise. A Mesh smoothing removes undesirable noise while still preserving
desirable geometric and shape of the original model. This project improving
the mesh smoothing tools in blender, based on curvature flow operator in a
diffusion equation.

*OpenGL Mobile Compatibility and Android Port* - Alexandr Kuznetsov
(Mentor: Ton Roosendaal)
This project aims to made OpenGL slightly faster and compatible with OpenGL
ES in order to port Blender Player to Android. This would include port of
libs, ghost and build infrastructure. At the end Blender Games can be
played on Android.

*New tesselator + "nice triangles"* - Andrei Simionescu (Mentor: Campbell
Barton)
The idea is to build a new tessellation tool to replace the old scanfill
one. The new tesselator should be fast, first of all, but also handle
degeneracies, handle non-planer polygons, deal with the general case of
polygons containing other polygons. Post-processing the
tessellation/triangulation to make "nice" triangles/quads/etc. as a basis
for an improved 'Beautify' tool.

*Viewport FX* - Jason Wilkins (Mentor: Ton Roosendaal)
Improve the performance, flexibility, and customization of the 3D view port.

*User Interface Tasklist*
Jorge Rodriguez (Mentor: Thomas Dinges)
I will be working on a list of improvements to Blender’s operators and user
interface. Some of these items come from the Blender Wiki and bug tracker
and some come from my own observations. I will be focusing on usability and
user interface.

*Precision Modeling Tools* - Luke Frisken (Mentor: Martin Poirier)
Add several new, and more flexible snapping and constraint modes to
Blender. Eventually work towards incorporating these features into several
more tools such as knife and loop cut. Addition of several new tools such
as a extrude by rail, and a pen tool which makes extensive use of
snapping/constraint modes.

*Smoke Simulator Improvements* - MiikaH (Mentor: Daniel Genrich)
The goal of this project is to improve Blender's smoke simulator with
various new features to allow creation of even more realistic visual
effects.

*BGE Converter Improvements* - Mitchell Stokes (Mentor: Dalai Felinto)
Various converter improvements such as saving out converted data to disk
and allowing for asynchronous level loading.

*Multitouch Framework* - Nicholas Rishel (Mentor: Mike Erwin)
Extending recognition for multitouch input for SDL for the purpose of
navigation, and a framework for future additions. As envisioned, the
immediate result would serve as a compliment to a stylus. This would
prepare Blender for the incoming Slate form factor machines (see Samsung
Series 7 Slate and Asus Eee EP121), and potentially ease ports to Android
touch devices.

*Improve COLLADA constrained animations and Morph animation support.* -
Phabtar (Mentor: LetterRip)
This project will be to Improve the COLLADA im/export functions of
constrained animations, including Baked IK animations and IK chain
animations. Also the project will attempt to implement Morph constraint
animations in COLLADA.

*Adding Subsurface Scattering to Cycles* - Roger Wilco (Mentor: Brecht Van
Lommel)
Subsurface Scattering (SSS) describes how light penetrates a surface and
exits at some other point. This makes the surface look translucent and is
required to make things like skin or milk, which are naturally translucent,
look realistic.

*Bullet Integration* - Sergej Reich (Mentor: Aligorith)
This project aims at continuing the work done by Joshua Leung for the
Google Summer of Code 2010, integrating the bullet physics library natively
into blender so users don't have to go through the clumsy process of
running their simulations inside blenders game engine

*Adapting the Hive system for the Blender Game Engine* - Spencer Alves
(Mentor: Benoit Bolsee)
This project aims to make a more accessible, efficient, and useful editor
for logic systems in the Blender Game Engine by integrating the Hive
systems project into Blender.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?252924-Gsoc-2012-Announced-blender-awarded-16-projects

Note that the details of the projects are not completely finalized in that
the mentor and student will likely make some adjustments to the planned
work scope, etc. especially where projects might end up with a bit of
overlapping scope (ie the mesh tool projects).

There were a number of excellent proposals that we were unable to accept
this year - it is just the nature of GSoC that there will almost always be
more excellent proposals than there are slots and mentors available to
accept them.

For those students whose proposals we were unable to accept this year we
greatly appreciate you taking the time and effort to submit a proposal and
participate in the selection process.  We would still love to have you
contribute to Blender and become a part of our developer community, and
perhaps to apply again next year.

Tom M.
LetterRip