The Blender Foundation is taking part in Google’s summer of code (gsoc) again this year and Google even granted them 15 projects this year!
Exciting times ahead, lots of very interesting project ideas which are going to be implemented by talented coders, under the supervision of experienced Blender developers as their mentors. Among the proposals and therefore projects I look forward to the most are:
*Cycles Deformation Motion Blur by Gavin Howard Now this is one of the most important features to make cycles (even more) production ready and attractive for studios to do their animation projects with it!
*Viewport FX II by Jason Wilkins Jason continues his work from last year, improving, rewriting and bringing up to date of Blender’s screendrawing abilities, ultimately resulting in performance improvements and hopefully new features.
*Dependency Graph and Evaluation by Joshua Leung Altough I don’t expect any features visible to the end user from this gsoc-project, it will be the first step of the big Dependency Graph rewrite that lots of people are waiting for. If you want to know mehr about this topic, you can read it here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Source/Data_System/Dependency_Graph/Overview (I suppose the last topic “Improving the System” includes some of the goals of this gsoc-project)
*Cycles Projects: New Shader Nodes by Thomas Dingens/Texturing for Volume Rendering in Cycles by Rafael Campos Lots of work is being done in Cycles code and both of these projects aim to add useful features to this great renderengine. Thomas already told me about some of the ideas he’s going to implement and I’m really looking forward to it, his project also includes speed improvements for Cycles, which is never bad ;) As is written in the description of the Texturing for Volume Rendering in Cycles project, volume rendering consists of texturing+shading, and while Brecht is going to mentor this project, he is going to implement the volume shading part by himself. I am willing to bet that both of these projects will be successful.
Other projects include the ability to define macros(Vincent Akkermans – Towards a full User action replay system) in Blender, improvements in the texture painting system, OpenGL debugging, motion tracking, rigid body simulation and even the Video Sequence Editor as well as a BGE LOD/bugfixing project mentored by my friend Jörg Müller!
Read the full announcement, including alls projects, here: http://code.blender.org/index.php/2013/05/google-summer-of-code-2013/
I can’t wait to read the full proposals of each projects, exciting times ahead for sure. :)
Happy blending!