Blender to get sketch mesh editing, deformation blur?

Blender could soon get deformation motion blur and a intriguing-sounding system for editing meshes by sketching lines on their surface, if work from the Google Summer of Code project comes to fruition.

The three-month program offers student developers stipends to write code for open-source software projects, working under mentors from the Blender development community.

Fifteen new research projects this year
This year, 15 Blender projects have been accepted into the scheme. In addition to sketch mesh editing and deformation blur, other research covers the Cycles renderer, paint tools and game engine.

There is also a longer-term project aimed at creating a “full action replay” of user commands: too ambitious to finish within the three months, but which should lead to the completion of Blender’s macro system.

When will you be able to use these tools?
It’s difficult to predict how long it will be before any successful work shows up in the main build of the software.

However, past history suggests between one and three years: work done on Bullet physics integration during Google Summer of Code 2010 and 2012 made its way into Blender 2.66.

Read more about the Blender projects on the Google Summer of Code website