[Bf-committers] GSoC 2017: Cycles features & Package management

gandalf3 zzyxpaw at gmail.com
Sat Mar 18 03:46:10 CET 2017


Greetings,

I just realized that I qualify to participate in GSoC this year!
I've been a user of Blender since 2.57, and have always dreamed of 
developing it. I've dabbled with the odd patch here and there, but I 
want to get involved further.

I'm most interested in cycles anamorphic breathing, IES support, or the 
package manager (or possibly audio nodes).
I chose these as I have rather minimal experience with C/C++ at the 
moment (I've only done basic stuff, e.g. linked-list implementations etc).
Hopefully this will quickly change; I will be taking a class on the 
subject this spring.


Anyway, I thought I'd ask a few questions right away to start narrowing 
down the list of ideas I picked out:

Lens breathing:
If I understand correctly, lens breathing is a change in focal 
length/aspect ratio that occurs with adjustments to the focal plane 
(depth of field).
Would this be more or less an option to automatically "animate" focal 
length (+ aspect ratio changes in case of anamorphic lens) as focus 
distance changes? Or might it include other effects, such as softness of 
corners?

IES support:
The ideas page mentions an already existing patch[0], and lists UI/tools 
as the main challenge. What sort of tools would this project include?


Package manager:
My first thought is: what exactly would a "package" be? I see the design 
doc[1] mentions they may contain things besides addons. What else might 
a package contain, and how would different kinds of content be 
differentiated?
I think painlessly supporting existing addons sounds nice (i.e. no extra 
"package metadata" files), but I'm not sure how that could be done while 
cleanly allowing for new kinds of packages in the future? (Would addons 
themselves be able to define package types?)


Audio nodes:
Where would this fit in? Would it work in conjunction with the BGE? VSE? 
Speaker objects?
What might a use-case look like?



I'd love to discuss all these things further and work out which idea 
would be best to tackle this summer.
Where and how would be the preferred way to do this?
Thanks!

I'm usually in #blendercoders IRC as gandalf3


[0]: https://developer.blender.org/D1543 (I assume this is the patch 
referenced?)
[1]: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.8/Source/PackageManager



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