GSoC 2025: Wrapping up

[PardhavMaradani]

Hi @BradyAJohnston , @yuxuanzhuang , next week (Aug 18 - 24) will be Week 12 and the final week of coding for GSoC 2025. I will use the week after that to write up the Blender specific learnings (as discussed in our previous meeting) and the final report (due Sep 1).

There is currently an open PR #926 for adding basic compositing needed to render annotations. For next week, I had a couple of items on my list:

1. Add basic rendering animation support to Canvas - it seems like the Canvas related changes are in a very early stage. I was thinking of maybe adding support to render individual frames (showing progress using tqdm or MDAnalysis's log.ProgressBar) and putting together the final .mp4 using Blender's Video sequence Editor API
2. Maybe add a new Trajectory annotation for the Helix Analysis results shown in the user guide - like showing local axes, the local twists (θ), the local helix directions, the global axis and the local heights

Please let me know if you have any thoughts on the above or if there are any other items you want me to take a look at instead, etc. Thanks

[BradyAJohnston]

Thanks for the summary and for already implementing a bunch of the canvas related changes!

I think the best use of final time would be on writing documentation / code examples to put in the documentation for what has already been implemented than adding more annotation types. You are more than welcome to keep contributing (and it would be awesome if you do!) to the project outside of GSoC window - but for 'official' GSoC obligations just some more example docs would be great.

[PardhavMaradani]

Hi @BradyAJohnston , couple of more questions:

1. For documenting one of the density examples - solvent density around protein from the userguide, I need the TPR (adk_oplsaa.tpr) and XTC (adk_oplsaa.xtc) test data files. Should I add them to MN test data files separately (like we did for PSF and DCD) or is there an easy way to add the MDAnalysisTests dependency for at least docs and tests?
2. Could you suggest where I should add the Blender learnings file? I will create it as as markdown file.

[BradyAJohnston]

Yep just add MDAnalysisTests as a dependency for docs / tests and lets start using that for downloading data. If you wanted to replace the datasets that were added in one of your PRs with auto-downloaded versions as well that would probably be a good idea. Changing over the rest of the repo to use it I'll handle at a later point.

Learnings file can just go under the API tab for now (next to materials / styles API docs). Need to put together a section in the docs about contributing and it will eventually go there but that can be moved around easily later.

[PardhavMaradani]

Closing this as the final set of items are covered in PR #943