This years Google Summer of Code is over, and the students improved Blender in many areas. Here you can find a summary of the results. Thanks to Google for having us in this years GSoC!

Beziers Curve Editing (João Araújo)

João worked on Blenders Beziers curves. He improved the extrusion of curves and added new tools.

Extend tool

Batch Extend tool

Trim tool

Offset tool

Chamfer tool

Fillet tool

More information can be found here.

Layer Manager (Julian Eisel)

Julian worked on a new layer manager, allowing artists to easily work with layers, group them together, reorder them to organize them nicely and of course removing the limit of 20 layers. He also added tools for a meaningful color system (colored wireframes).

More information can be found here.

Cycles Denoising (Lukas Stockner)

Lukas worked on Cycles render denoising. It’s purpose is to remove remaining noise from rendered images while preserving more details than a compositor setup could. To do so, it collects additional information during rendering, which can either be used to denoise tiles right after they are rendered, or to denoise the image later after the rendering is completed.

More information can be found here.

PBVH Vertex Painting (Nathan Vollmer)

Nathan worked on Blenders vertex painting, improving painting performance (4-6x faster), adding new tools and mirroring functionality and finally splash prevention.

More information can be found here.

UV Tools (Philipp Gosch)

Philipp improved Blenders UV Tools, especially the Pack Island tool. While a bit more computation heavy, the solutions found by the new algorithm can be way better than the old “Pack Islands” in terms of used UV space. Additionally new tools were added, like Select Shortest Vertex Path, Scale to Bounds and Select Overlapping UVs. Last but not least he made improvements to snapping and UV hiding.

More information can be found here.

Cycles Texture System (Thomas Dinges)

Thomas worked on the Cycles texture system, increasing the maximum amount of textures that can be used on CUDA GPUs, and lowering memory usage in many cases, allowing artists to create more complex scenes. He also added HDR texture support to OpenCL devices.

More information can be found here.

Multi-view Camera Reconstruction (Tianwei Shen)

Tianwei added support for Multi-view Reconstruction into Blender. The main benefit for this new feature is to deliver robust camera reconstruction results as people on set often shoot witness clips to aid the solving of the main clip.

More information can be found here.

Manta Fluids (Sebastian Barschkis)

Sebastian integrated Mantaflow liquid effects into Blender. The exisiting Mantaflow smoke integration, which builds on top of the smoke modifier, was taken as a basis and extended to handle Mantaflows FLIP based liquid effects as well.

More information can be found here.