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Blender Summer of Code 2024 - Ideas

This page collects potential ideas and mentors for contributor projects in the summer of 2024.

Contacting us

You can contact us via our developers forum or on blender.chat. For matters you prefer to discuss in private, mail Thomas Dinges: thomas at blender.org.

General information for contributors and mentors

New to GSoC? Learn how it works on the GSoC website.

The ideas list below provides ideas for projects that:

  • Have an expected project size of ~90, ~175 or ~350 working hours.
  • Implements a feature that developers have agreed would be a great improvement for Blender.

Submit your own proposal

Choosing an idea from this list is not mandatory. Contributors are encouraged to submit their own proposals or modified versions of the ideas from this page. To get an idea of what sort of project can be done for Blender and of the current development direction, see:

Mentors

A mentor should be someone with Blender coding experience, who can guide a contributor during all stages of the work, from design to implementation.

Contributors

Contributors who wish to apply should first carefully read the Getting Started page and check if all the conditions to participate are met.

If by some reason you can not participate, your contribution outside of the program is still welcome! Feel free to develop an idea from the page as long as no contributor chose it.

We especially invite contributors to contribute based on their past experience and competencies, or based on their current research.

Nearly all project ideas will require a strong working knowledge of C and/or C++. In addition, we use Python for much of our interface code (anyone skilled in C/C++ can trivially learn enough Python to make the needed interface code changes). An exception to this are projects where only Python is required.

Get Started

Getting Started Guide and Application Template

Ideas

Flamenco

Improve Distributed Rendering & Task Execution

  • Description: Flamenco is more popular than ever, but still missing certain key features. Some suggestions to work on are listed below. Note that these are of varying difficulty and size.
    • Convert the build toolchain to Mage to simplify development and packaging on Windows. (#102633 and #102671).
    • Allow finishing setup assistant without Blender on Manager (#100195).
    • Introduce per-Worker logs on the Manager, for introspection and debugging.
    • Introduce RNA Overrides (#101569).
    • Create a web interface for Flamenco Manager configuration (#99426).
    • Create job types for various tasks, such as distributed rendering of single images, and more powerful control over parameters for studios.
    • Improve stability and predictability (for example #99417).
    • Use Fyne to give Flamenco Manager and Worker an optional GUI for desktop use.
    • Add an icon & metadata to the Windows executables using go-winres.
    • There are plenty of other things to work on if you want.
  • Expected outcomes: Give users a simple way to distribute tasks, such as rendering, over multiple computers on their network.
  • Skills required: Familiarity with Go. Depending on the exact tasks that will be performed, also knowledge of Blender/Python and web languages (HTML/CSS/JavaScript).
  • Possible mentors: Sybren Stüvel.
  • Expected project size: 175 or 350 hours.
  • Difficulty: medium to hard, depending on the chosen tasks.

Geometry Nodes

Sample Sound Node

  • Description: This node allows retrieving the volume of a sound in frequency range at a point in time. It allows e.g. animating the spectrum of a song but also more complex things when combined with e.g. a simulation zone. It's a relatively small node that opens up many new possibilities in geometry nodes.
  • Expected outcomes: A new Sample Sound node that is highly flexible in its use and efficient (probably by doing a fair amount of caching).
  • Skills required: Proficient in C/C++, good understanding of FFT
  • Possible mentors: Jacques Lucke, Hans Goudey
  • Expected project size: 175 hours
  • Difficulty: medium

File Import Nodes

  • Description: Dynamically loading file formats like STL, OBJ, Alembic and CSV with a geometry node would simplify common data visualization tasks. Also it would reduce memory consumption on disk because the data does not have to be stored in the .blend file.
  • Expected outcomes: At least one new node that loads one of the file formats mentioned above. Depending on the complexity, more than one file format node should be added. The existing parsing code in Blender should be reused where appropriate. Some refactoring of existing parsing code may be required.
  • Skills required: Proficient in C/C++
  • Possible mentors: Jacques Lucke, Hans Goudey
  • Expected project size: 175 hours
  • Difficulty: medium

Spreadsheet Improvements

  • Description: The current spreadsheet in Blender is very limited in functionality. It can be greatly improved by adding features like editing, improved filtering, sorting and exporting.
  • Expected outcomes: New well designed functionality in the spreadsheet that makes it more useful for users.
  • Skills required: Proficient in C/C++
  • Possible mentors: Jacques Lucke, Hans Goudey
  • Expected project size: 175 hours
  • Difficulty: medium

Modeling

UV Editor Improvements

  • Description: A selection of some of the smaller user requests for UV editing tools would help users make better UV maps more easily. Some example ideas:
  • Expected outcomes: More tools to improve editing of UVs.
  • Skills required: Proficient in C/C++, familiarity with vector math
  • Possible mentors: Howard Trickey, Campbell Barton
  • Expected project size: 350 hours
  • Difficulty: medium

UV Stitch Tool Improvements

  • Description: Support stitching between UV islands resulting in gap-less joins at boundaries. This would require fitting one UV island to another by deforming it, other tasks may include:
    • Parameters for fitting boundaries, to adjust the tolerance for the extents of the boundaries which are merged.
    • Parameters for UV island distortion to adjust how the surrounding UV's are adjusted for minimal distortion.
    • Potentially multiple methods to fit islands.
  • Expected outcomes: Faster stitching of UV islands which are not exactly aligned, especially for organic models.
  • Skills required: Proficient in C/C++, familiarity with vector math
  • Possible mentors: Campbell Barton
  • Expected project size: 350 hours
  • Difficulty: medium

VFX & Video

Sequencer improvements

  • Description: A selection of various topics to improve the Video Sequencer:
    • Link strips: allow two strips to have strong bound between each other, like audio and video strips of the same input video file. Tools like transform, retime, cut, and others should handle linked strips together.
    • Better positioning of strip on adding and pasting. Currently the selection of a channel when adding new strip or pasting them from a clipboard feels random on user-level. The goal of this topic is to make this behavior clear and predictable.
    • Improved pitch management of audio strips: allow retiming with and without pitch correction.
    • Implement snapping support in the preview region of the sequencer.
  • Expected outcomes: Give users a better experience when editing video and audio in Blenders Video Sequencer.
  • Skills required: Proficient in C/C++, familiarity with vector math, DSP
  • Possible mentors: Richard Antalik, Aras Pranckevicius
  • Expected project size: 350 hours
  • Difficulty: medium