[Bf-committers] Freestyle integration - acknowledgement

[Tamito KAJIYAMA]

Dear All,

As most of you already know, the soc-2008-mxcurioni branch also known as the
Freestyle branch has been finally integrated into Blender.  The new component
is foreseen to be part of the official Blender 2.67 release.  Originally started as
a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2008 project, the integration work came to a
significant milestone after 5 years of development.  Through this integration,
Blender has got a non-photorealistic (NPR) rendering engine that allows users to
create 2D stylized lines from a given 3D scene.

The Freestyle integration project has been supported by many people.  I would
like to take this unique opportunity to thank all of them for all the help and
encouragement in various forms through many different communication channels.

First of all my sincere acknowledgement goes to Maxime Curioni who was the
leader of the GSoC 2008 Freestyle integration project.  All the integration work
was initiated by him.  He brought the project up to an advanced stage even after
the completion of the GSoC project.  Without his enormous efforts, Freestyle for
Blender never existed.

I would also like to thank the authors of the original Freestyle program, namely
Frédo Durand, Stéphane Grabli, François Sillion and Emmanuel Turquin.

Huge thanks go to the branch reviewers Brecht Van Lommel, Campbell Barton,
Sergey Sharybin, and IRIE Shinsuke.  Review comments and suggestions helped
significantly improve the overall quality of the Freestyle integration code base
and its consistency with other parts of Blender.

The Freestyle integration project has been substantially enhanced by major
code contributions.  Alexander Beels offered to the project a wonderful patch
set for speeding up the Freestyle renderer by a factor of up to 185.  His code
contribution was a result of long technical discussions and coding trials for 4
months.  Bastien Montagne contributed a number of big code clean-up patches in
view of the trunk merger.  Thanks to his patience and effort, code reviews went
very smooth in terms of coding style.

The Freestyle documentation has been largely user-driven.  Key contributors in
this regard are flokkievids, Light BWK, and Lee Posey (jikz).  Their work will be
the first edition of the Freestyle manual as part of the Blender documentation.

Last but not least, a big thank goes to all the early adopters of the Freestyle
branch.  The 5-year development of the Freestyle integration was helped by a
large number of artists, branch builders, and testers.  Remarkably, those branch
users in the BlenderArtists.org Freestyle thread always keep the user activities
active, helping the dev team through bug reports, updates of builds, many pieces
of artwork done by Freestyle, and lots of encouragement.  Their support and
feedback were absolutely essential for this kind of voluntary free software
development.  I am very grateful to all of them including the people listed below
(by no means this list is complete; any missing person who deserves a mention is
solely my fault): 3Duaun, blendman, bmania, bupla, Chris Burton, Mark Cannon
(pyrosever), Vicente Carro, Cloud_GL, crazycourier, Dazzle, delic, devroo,
Écrivain, edna, FEDB, flokkievids, Forrest Gimp, hinabita, holly, Ike AhLoe,
IRIE Shinsuke, Naoki, Nathan Letwory (jesterKing), Johan Tri Handoyo, Jonathan
Hudson, JO5EF, mzungu, Lee Posey (jikz), Light BWK, loopduplicate, macouno,
mato.sus304, mclelun, mib2berlin, Mohe & Shiratama (Moonlight Jellyfish), NRK,
octane98, pancreasboy, patricia3d, Paul Hartsuyker (paulhart2), procreaciones,
robi, Rylan Wright (RONIN), s12a, Nakeyta Schulz, Stéphane Grabli, tksg8086,
treatkor (tkroo), tungee, Uncle Entity, Unhurdof, Victor / tokiop, viralata, and yoff.

I am going to focus on bug fixes and documentation of the Freestyle renderer
for the upcoming 2.67 release.   Bug reports, comments and suggestions are
duly acknowledged.

With best regards,

-- 
KAJIYAMA, Tamito <rd6t-kjym at asahi-net.or.jp>