Presenting Our Google Summer of Code Students!
It's that time of the year again! Google has published the names of the students who will be allowed to work on open source of free software, and who will receive a stipend from Google. And like last year, this year we are mentoring four students!
Sharaf Zaman is a veteran from last year, when he ported Krita to Android. In fact, over the past couple of weeks he's been busy putting Krita in the Google Play Store, in the beta track. Apart from some administrative worries, we're ready to publish that! This year, he will implement a new kind of gradients: mesh gradients. Here is his project proposal. Mesh gradients were first implemented in Inkscape, and now we're going for a second, independent implementation. Here's a video of Inkscape's Mesh Gradients:
Leonardo Segovia will be adding dynamic fill layers, using SeExpr. Here is his project proposal. SeExpr is a language developed by Disney: an embeddable, arithmetic expression language that enables flexible artistic control and customization in creating computer graphics images. Example uses include procedural geometry synthesis, image synthesis, simulation control, crowd animation, and geometry deformation." After integrating this language in Krita, it will become possible to script fill layers, meaning everyone can create new types of fill layers without having to know C++.
Saurabh Kumar is going to work on a storyboard feature for Krita: a way to easily create connected images, and, more importantly, to visualize them, order them and annotate the images. The project also includes exporting the finished storyboards as PDF. His project plan is here.
Ashwin Dhakaita will be integrating the MyPaint brush library in Krita as a new brush engine. Once upon a time Krita did have a MyPaint brush engine, but the MyPaint developers dropped their existing integration support and created a new library. But these days many more applications use the mypaint brush library, meaning that integrating it is much safer. Here is his project proposal.