The team behind the official Blender releases, the bf-blender project, has choosen five nominees for the 2004 "Best coding contribution award". Needless to say, it wasn't an easy choice, with over 30 active developers in the team, and numerous more developers who have provided great patches over the past year. Everyone, thanks a lot!
Apart from his great work on integrating Yafray in Blender, he contributed to Blender two much wanted features.
Adding Voronoi, Musgrave, and a load of choices for Noise sampling formulas, making mixing a procedural texture a true Image Synthesizer
With the addition of ray tracing to Blender, image quality has improved a lot. Not in the least because of the very powerful Ambient Occlusion method, which simply enhances any scene with subtle realistic shades.
Although Jens accuses Brecht from doing most of the work, we do have evidence they cooperated as a team on this. :)
Especially for the 2.33 and 2.34 releases they have added to Blender advanced support for UV texture editing. With as highlight integration of so-called "Least Square Conformance Mapping" (LSCM), providing a powerful tool for artists to unwrap complex geometry for well balanced texturing.
This developer from New Zealand deserves all the credits for bringing back the game engine in Blender, restoring faith in Blender for the long forgotten game creation enthusiasts. He's very competent in OpenGL development as well, helping fixing one of the most annoying "Ati" bugs in Blender.
Thanks to Matt the 2.3 UI project came to realization. During 2003/2004 he spent incredible hours on improving the interface, not only as a designer producing interface proposals and consistancy guidelines, but also coding himself on pulldown menus, button themes and menus. His website with research projects and ideas has become a very valuable resource.
Nathan is especially renowned for being our irc channel jester-king, providing not only entertainment but especially an everlasting eagerness to help out people and support development in general.
In the past year he contributed especially on maintaining the Windows platform, MSVC Project files, and the Scons make system. He's assisting the BF in development support, maintaining the projects site, Wiki and doing meeting minutes.
His development projects currently involve a MySQL server for Blender data and Verse support in Blender. And he makes funny videos!