blender development

October 24th, 2009 . 16 comments

As some of you may have seen, yesterday during the 2009 Blender conference keynote, Ton Roosendaal announced the addition of another full time blender developer: me! Thanks to the support of a very generous anonymous sponsor, I should be able to survive working from home on Blender development for the next few months.

This came about over the last week or two, so it’s still new for me as well. As far as I’m currently aware, the brief for this project is ‘Get Blender 2.5 ready’. So rather than some of the other things I’ve been working on in my own time such as volume rendering, at least in the near term, this project will involve a fair bit of ui work, fixes, tweaks, cleaning up, attacking the 2.5 todo list, documentation – attacking the main things needed to get the 2.5/2.6 work polished to a professional level.

I also hope to be able to provide support to other developers who are working on other tools, to help polish things for 2.5 where they may not have time to do so themselves. This also includes Brecht and Campbell at the Blender Institute who are busy with Durian – I suspect I’ll be taking on some of their grunt work, so they can concentrate on what’s needed for their production. Hopefully this can alleviate some of the ‘blender open project syndrome’, where features are added quickly to fill a specific need for the team, but aren’t entirely well integrated or fleshed out enough to be fully useful for blender users in general.

So that’s the plan as it stands for now. Depending on how soon these tasks can be done, perhaps there will be time for some other things such as working on python integration related work, render api, or also something I think is desperately needed – design and coding work for a re-written shading/material system. But time will tell!

§ 16 Responses to blender development"

  • ibkanat says:

    great to see this matt many are rejoicing, and I with them.

  • RH2 says:

    Rejoice! Go Matt!

  • Glenn says:

    Fantastic news mate. Now I have someone I can hassle directly! 🙂

    ~Glenn

  • Matt says:

    cheers guys!

    Glenn: Sure, I’m always happy to work on everyone’s personal requests*

    *standard freelance rates apply 😉

  • Blenderificus says:

    sounds like good news to me. Thanks for your hard work/talent Matt.

  • Jakub steiner says:

    This is fantastic news! Huge thanks to the anonymous sponsor 😉

  • Tristan Lock says:

    Congrats dude. How will redcartel survive without you :D. Oh and if i don’t see backface culling in wireframe mode for 2.5, I’m going to hold you personally responsible, and then i’m going to kick you in the balls.

  • Halffull says:

    “Hopefully this can alleviate some of the ‘blender open project syndrome’, where features are added quickly to fill a specific need for the team, but aren’t entirely well integrated or fleshed out enough to be fully useful”

    This reminds me of a quote I saw recently from Brad, co-founder of Luxology.

    “The presentation was called “Why ask why?” and the premise was that it is more important to …understand WHY they want a specific feature than to simply add a feature. If we can get to the very foundation of the request, …we can often provide them with a more complete or general solution than simply implementing a given feature. This to me is a real problem with the software industry today.”

    Hopefully Matt, your new full time developer status will allow you to be the one that asks “Why?” on the blender team. Allowing Blender 2.5 to not only be feature rich, but also logical, intuitive and extensible.

    Cheers,

    the other Matt

  • William says:

    This is wonderful news! Good luck.

  • Matt says:

    cheers all!

    Tristan: Hey man, shame we didn’t get to reunite the team again on that last job, hope you’d busy with something else! Anyways I’ll see what I can do 🙂 … and wear a cricket box

  • Tristan Lock says:

    Yeah I know I miss the old days hanging out with you guys. It turned out to be a good thing though, a couple of days later I got the call to work at Animal Logic on the “Guardians of Ga’hoole” movie. So I’m working there til the end of February now. We definitely have to catch up for Christmas drinks.

  • Matt says:

    Ooh, nice one! Guess it’s not icebergs this time? 🙂 Definitely catchup is in order.

  • Virgilio says:

    Yeah… if there was anyone suspicious about how good would Blender 2.5 come out, I believe now there’s no reason to wonder. 🙂

    Great news!

  • Mal says:

    No better man for the job – congratulations! Your mix of artistic eye, UI passion and coding skills will definitely help ensure that Blender 2.5 is going to rock!

  • kubat4 says:

    Congratulations, it’s a really big thing for blender community. Blender 2.5 is going to appear faster and better than I supposed. There were many projects, and some of them are still waiting to get integrated into trunk.

    Personally I wonder if the project concerning photon mapping and final gathering, that you’ve run some time ago, would get intergated into blender 2.5 trunk. There’s much work around blender rendering engine getting done now, and photon mapping test builds seemed promising. Having real GI solution would be a big thing, now I need to fake the effect in many ways. Most of the commercial rendering apps includes true GI solutions. Of course external renderes can be used, but every time it’s a translation from blender format to other, so all the tools of blender can’t be used (eg. render layers, generaly nodes, strand particles).

    So many important things have been already implemented – volume rendering, new sculpting, and one that I realy enjoy myself – Freestyle egde render from GSoC. It’s a last minute for a good GI solution.

  • great 1

    congrats !

    you could implement a bpm time line for blender ;D

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