[Soc-2012-dev] welcome to the successful gsoc applicants

[Tom M]

Hi all,

Congratulations to the successful Summer of Code applicants!

Here is the list of the accepted students in no particular order, as
well as their project, and the individual who has agreed to help
mentor them.  With your help we hope to make this the most successful
GSoC yet.

Project ----------------------------Student--------------------------------
Mentor Name
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.

As you can tell, I've subscribed you to a Summer of Code mailing list
that we'll use through out the summer -- more about this list here:

http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/soc-2012-dev

Two other mailing lists that you are very strongly advised to
subscribe to are the Blender development list,  and the Blender cvs
list (sorry, you have to subscribe yourself):

http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-blender-cvs

Commit log mails for Summer of Code go to the (poorly named)
bf-blender-cvs mailing list mentioned above.

If you don't have a p.b.o (projects.blender.org) account, please sign
up for one and send your username to this list. If you already have an
account, please send your username:

http://projects.blender.org

Another resource is irc: most of the mentors visit #blendercoders
channel on irc.freenode.net.

Here are some IRC handles of some of the SoC mentors and some other
helpful developers:

Ton Roosendaal - kaito
Martin Poirier - theeth
Brecht von Lommel - brecht
Campbell Barton - ideasman_42
Thomas Dinges - dingto
Howard Trickey - howardt
Joshua Leung - aligorith
Lukas Toenne - lukast
Daniel Genrich - gencher
Andrea Weikert - elubie
Benoit Bolsee - ben2610
Dalai Felinto - dfelinto
Tom Musgrove - letterrip
William Reynish - billrey
Peter Schlaile - schlaile
Janne Karhu - jahka
Nathan Letwory - jester[King,Dad]
Matt Ebb - matt_e
Joe Eagar - joeedh
Ken Hughes - khpylon
Geoff Bantle - Briggs
Kent Mein - sirdude
Erwin Coumans - erwin_bullet
Chris Want - cwant

We have weekly coding meetings in the #blendercoders channel on
Sundays at 16:00 CEST (14:00 GMT, 08:00 MST, 07:00 PST -- if your time
zone isn't listed, please try to figure out the meeting time).

There are also development forums on 'w.b.o' (http://www.blender.org/)
and Blender Artists
(http://blenderartists.org/forum/).

This would also be a good time to get some information from you, so if
you have a moment sometime this week could you please send a mail to
this list saying "Hi", and answering the following questions:

* Have you every used subversion before?
* What OS do you use for development?
* What compiler do you use?
* Have you built the blender sources before?
* Do you have an IRC nickname? (If I have it above, you can ignore)
* What is your p.b.o username? (see above)
* Have you been in contact with your mentor yet?
* Feel free to include any other info you think
it might be useful to share.

For those of you new to the blender code base, here are some links to
help get you started

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Doc/Developers_Quickstart
http://blenderartists.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?50-Beginning-Blender-Code-and-Development
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?249031-VIDEOS-Blender-Sourcerers-Videos

Again, congratulations to the students, and many thanks to those who
have agreed to be mentors, and also thanks to those other interested
parties who have helped evaluate proposals.

More to come later ...

Thanks,

Tom Musgrove
LetterRip

Also thanks to Chris Want whom I've liberally copy and pasted his
welcome message from a previous year