Google Inc. sponsors Summer of Code (SoC) each year for students over age 18. For those under 18 they sponsor Code-In. This year 15 Blender projects have been included in the mix of SoC projects. They are:
- Painting tool improvements
- Sketch Mesh Editing
- VSE Improvements
- Dependency Graph and Evaluation Engine Refactor
- BGE Level of Detail and Bug Fixing/Polishing
- Deformation Motion Blur
- Improved Debugging and Profiling in BGE
- Viewport FX II
- Expand and improve Blender’s motion tracking module
- Texturing for Volume Rendering in Cycles
- Rigid Body Simulation Improvements
- Threaded dependency graph
- Cycles – Add new shader nodes and shading features
- Towards a full action replay system
- Mesh Custom-Data Transfer
I’m not sure how many of these projects will directly affect the Second Life™ community. You can read more about each project on the SoC pages: Accepted Blender Projects. Click the project description to get more information.
Congratulations Blender guys and thanks Google.