Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

On 4/17/06, John Taber <jtaber@...480...> wrote:

...

A couple more ideas:

1. 3D stuff

You mean perspective transformations?

This is still ToDo for next SVG Full spec. "SVG may allow transformations to allow higher level matrices and perspective transformations."

yes and more - there's already been some examples on the web regarding 3D SVG so it would be cool to start getting the capabilities into Inkscape - Alan mentioned perspective gridlines, maybe that is what is needed. And maybe some interface with Blender but I think there's 2 levels of 3D - the real high level studio/engr work and much easier to use 3D for the 80% of common users. I think Inkscape would fall into the latter.

Bryce Harrington wrote:

On Mon, Apr 17, 2006 at 10:58:13AM -0600, John Taber wrote:

...

A couple more ideas:

1. 3D stuff

2. Animation - maybe a nice timeline gui

Hmm, these seem rather broad; I think these are worth adding if we can give some more specific direction on them. Animation may be a tricky one, but I know it's important to a lot of people, so if a good, specific project can be identified it'd be great to list.

Oh I agree - sent them off in between tax forms. They are both real needs for us so whatever someone can suggest would be great.

On the 3D area, if what Alan was suggesting on the perspective gridline would be for 3D drawing, then that might be a good project. Or maybe just tackling one of the shapes like rectangle.

On the animation area, I thought just the design of a good timeline gui dialog would be a great start, something better than the keyframe approach but maybe that's something requiring too much consensus for a SOC project. Maybe an Ajax based approach.

John Cliff wrote:

I think we should be careful not to underexpect of SOC students, This is meant to be a full time summer job essentially. Last year some of the projects completed for other groups were pretty darn big and complicated, Blender got a new rigging system for instance. Dont get me wrong, the guys did a great job last year but we really shouldnt limit them with preconceptions.

Right now we need to give ideas that are defined enough to grab their attention and confidence. Should there be something on the Home Page to attract students, like a big headline "Summer of Code Is On!" then link to the wiki page of ideas.

Having taught a bunch of college courses I can say there are some great minds out there with tons of energy. But at age 20 or so, most still need (and want!) some structure - it seems to work best when they start with something they can get their hands around, gain quick confidence, and then expand upon.

We might also want to set and try to enforce some crystal clear expectations (ie post code, update project status wiki every 2 wks or whatever - remember they have the energy to meet these kinds of rules), then offer them lots of helpful encouragement and feedback, but also giving them lots of space to accomplish creative things. A few don't need any guidance but most need some. While most of Inkscape's projects last year went great, it seemed the one less successful project did not engage in that agile, release early/often mode to gain more helpful feedback. The other projects seemed to have some stuff running in the first few weeks.