Google Summer of Code/2008

After a detailed evaluation and review period, we requested and were approved to mentor four students for the 2008 Google Summer of Code. Our students were selected from among nearly two dozen applicants based on their potential as a new long-term developer, their ability to communicate effectively, the quality of their project proposal, their technical ability, and our ability to effectively mentor them.

Student selections

It was a competitive selection process with several great applicants that had to be turned away but in the end, our four selections were made. Thanks go out to all of our applicants, and I hope to see many of them stay involved in BRL-CAD development regardless of GSoC. That's one of the many perks of being an open source project -- the door is always open for new contributors. Thanks are also deserved to all our available mentors and backup mentors that did a great job of weighing the pros and cons of each proposal, interacting with the candidates, making the difficult decisions, and ultimately choosing an exciting mix of students and projects for GSoC 2008. That said and without further adieu, I'm happy to announce our four selected students and their accepted projects:

Timothy Van Ruitenbeek

Implementing Solid of Revolution and Sweep Primitives

Mentored by Daniel Roßberg, Timothy's project aims to implement two primitives that have been requested numerous times over the years: sweep and revolve. These two primitives provide a wide range of modeling benefits including the ability to express various complex shapes more intuitively and easily. Such shapes that will become readily possible to construct include lathe shapes, cables, blends, carved shapes, and much more.

• Design document for Revolve Primitive
• Development log

André Castelo Branco Gomes

Global Illumination Renderer using Metropolis Light Transport and LIBRT

Mentored by Erik Greenwald, André's project involves implementing a new global illumination renderer using BRL-CAD's existing LIBRT ray-trace library. This rendering technique provides highly realistic image synthesis (pretty pictures!) through a variant of the Monte-carlo method and bidirectional path tracing. This will make it much easier to generate beautiful detailed renderings of any BRL-CAD geometry without requiring polygonal tessellation.

• Design document for Metropolis Light Transport
• Development blog at http://andrecastelo.wordpress.com

Dawn Thomas

Parametric Equations and Constraint Support

Mentored by John Anderson, Dawn's project is a highly ambitious effort that aims to provide constraints and parametric equation support for BRL-CAD geometry. Parametric constraints allows geometry to be described in very powerful and expressive ways including constructing geometry that preserves tangency, stays aligned through complex transformations, maintains relative dimensions, resolves dependent articulations, and more.

• Design document for Libpg
• Development Log : Parametrics

Manuel Antonio Fernandez Montecelo

New GUI Framework for Modeling and Visualization

Mentored by Bob Parker, Manuel's project is the start of a new graphical user interface (GUI) for visualizing, manipulating, and managing BRL-CAD geometry. This interface serves as a solid framework for improving BRL-CAD's usability by providing support for shaded displays, scene graph management, and more. This thin client is the start of a new user interface that will focus on usability, efficiency, scalability, and the human-computer interaction.

• Design document for OpenGL GUI Framework
• Development log

Getting started

Students participating with BRL-CAD in the 2008 GSoC have a checklist of actions to attend to before getting started on their projects. They are also expected to be aware of what is expected of them throughout the summer.

Additional Information

This year, more than 7000 applications were received from nearly 4000 students for the 175 participating organizations. Of those, only 1125 applications/students will be funded. Altogether, this represents a $5.6 million dollar (USD) investment by Google in open source software development. Way cool.

You can see our Project Ideas page for a list of project suggestions that were suggested to be of particular interest to our mentors for 2008. There were several other areas of development that are of high-interest as well. Students were welcome to submit their own unique ideas as well and were encouraged to collaborate with our mentors on formulating those projects. Student applications for GSoC 2008 were accepted on Google's project website between March 24 and March 31 at http://code.google.com/soc/2008/