Blender Foundation

License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Web Page: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/GoogleSummerOfCode/2014/Ideas

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

Blender is the free/open source 3D creation software for everyone, providing individuals and small teams a complete pipeline for 3D graphics, modeling, animation and games.

Blender is being made by 100s of active volunteers from all around the world; by studios and individual artists, professionals and hobbyists, scientists and students, vfx experts and animators, and so on.

All of them are united by an interest to have access to a fully free/open source 3D creation pipeline. Blender Foundation supports and facilitates these goals - even employs a small staff for that - but fully depends on the online community to achieve it.

Since 2005, Blender Foundation has organized four short films and a game project, which helped Blender tremendously to get more accepted by professionals in their daily work.

We invite students to think of ways to help us with this further. If your passion is with 3D coding, creativity tools, scientific simulation, or anything related to Computer Graphics in general, feel welcome to join us!

Projects

• BGE - Cleanup & Support This proposal targets identified problems with BGE acknowledged in Blender's roadmap along with plans for better integration as an interactive mode. The proposal aims to be a first step in that direction by addressing the bug tracker and known problematic parts of the GE. By the end of the program, the results should be less bugs and pending patches, parts of functionality/code more bug-proof and suitable for integration, happier users and a document identifying problems to be addressed next.
• Cycles: Performance and Memory optimizations I'd like to improve the Cycles render engine, both in terms of performance and memory usage.
• Interactive Quadrilateral Remeshing Based on Harmonic Functions A lot of computer graphics objects have an undesirable topology. Many artists require changing the topology of the mesh to facilitate the process of editing and animation. In recent years, the most popular mesh topology is composed of triangles and quadrilaterals that provide several desired features by the artists. This project proposes an interactive remeshing tool that generate a quad-dominant mesh based on harmonic functions.
• MantaFlow integration for fluid simulations Integration of MantaFlow for fluid simulations into Blender, mentored by Nils Thuerey
• NURBS Modernization I propose to revive a longstanding effort to improve NURBS support in blender with two broad goals: one, attaining import/export compatibility for common NURBS-based CAD and modeling formats, and two, adding industry-standard NURBS manipulation tools so that blender can actively participate in workflows containing NURBS primitives.
• Relative shape keys workflow enhancements Enhancements for relative shape key editing workflow: new blending-oriented Shape Keys panel GUI permitting for faster and more intuitive shape key editing. A simple commit workflow for shape keys is introduced.
• Viewport FX III This is a proposal to finalize the development of Viewport FX by implementing the last missing features and performing optimization and testing. Additional info about possible future work has been appended to the original proposal.