[Bf-committers] GSoC 2012 / Importer work

[Alexander Gessler]

Hey,

my name is Alex, I'm an CS undergraduate at Stuttgart University. I'm an
avid programmer with slight focus on 3D graphics and 3D file interchange
in special.

I found Blender's idea list for GSoC this year and there are some topics
that I'd be very interested in working on - but maybe I should first
explain my background.

Some years ago I co-founded and manage to this day the development of
Open Asset Import Library (assimp, http://assimp.sf.net), which is a
portable, BSD-licensed C/C++ lib to read ~30 different 3D file formats,
including Collada, 3DS, X .. and BLEND (I wrote the importer for it, I
think it's the only open source implementation of the format, apart from
Blender itself and Bullet). There are various (incomplete) scripts to
integrate Assimp into Blender around. A possible idea for GSoC would be
to integrate our library directly into Blender - but given how many
formats Blender supports already, I'm not absolutely sure it would add
significant value - but maybe you think different?

Anyway, looking at the idea list on blenderwiki, everything in the
Import/Export section would nicely suit my background. I read that
Collada is already in the works, but I could tackle proper ASCII FBX
import support for Blender (I do actually like biting myself through
file formats that lack full specifications). IGES/Step would also be a
nice option, I did write STEP parsing code for Assimp's IFC importer in
the past so I'm not totally new to the topic.

I hope this wasn't too lengthy :-) Looking forward to your feedback!

Bye, Alex