Thanks to the first Steam Workshop donation payment, we can now invest quality developer time for getting Blender work better in game creation pipelines. I’m happy to announce that Blender developers Dalai Felinto and Bastien Montagne have accepted a 6 month contract to work half-time on supporting game artists! Their contract will become effective this week.First thing Dalai and Bastien will do is investigate with artists out there (via Steam Workshop too) a nice priority list of topics to handle. This will be publicly reviewed in our many channels and become part of the weekly meetings in IRC too.
Valve expects that Steam Workshop is going to be earning us a sizeable share. We’ll learn more about this during the next months though. But if this continues, more projects for developers can be funded this way. Main focus will be on good tools for game artists though, including features that benefit everyone well too. This also opens up an opportunity to realize a bigger project related to our Game Engine. That’s something we’ll discuss with the current GE team first though.
Exciting times ahead! Many many thanks to Valve and to the Steam Workshop members who decided to support Blender Foundation this way!
-Ton-
The game asset creation side has shown it can bring in funds. Its a huge untapped market for the most part that only Autodesk has been really enjoying…and not to the enjoyment of the end user.
Really surprised that deal has worked that well and that quickly so the BF could afford to hire 2 more core devs that fast !
That’s a very good surprise as it means this year there were more core devs than usual being hired, i hope the donations will then be able to keep up to keep them hired for longer and if all goes better maybe some more can join.
Normal editing (and importing/exporting), and more mesh modelling tools for me please.
Cycles baking would be great too, but imho don’t rush it and make it as user-programmable (OSL?) as possible. God knows what will get baked next gen and how it will be stored. Make it futureproof. Also, support baking to spherical harmonics. If cycles becomes just another baker that does everything the same way everybody else is doing it, then there’s very little point to it, better to just use xnormal.
The first thing the guys should look at is Middleware API for Blender that allows easy external integration of custom Opengl / DirectX realtime engines (Opengl is all that’s needed in my eye’s). Being able to run realtime engines through blender as the external rendering engine would without doubt be the most handy thing that can be done for starters. Then a OpenGL PBR Shader (glsl) that can also be used within cycles rendering pipeline that can bake down multiple cycles shaders & textures on to one model to one material with one set of PBR shader textures (Roughness, Albedo, Normal etc) which could also help with complex scene rendering on GPU’s with small memory footprints. Then looking at how cycles could be used in a realtime mode (Ray Bundle rendering for fast large scene lighting for Object/ Large world scene’s Light and material baking). Full support of .FBX scene loading with all related animation/skinning with in Blender with export to glTF format of animated and static models, GLSL shaders (work on a finalised glTF runtime support hierarchy). YEBIS 2 Post process style engine that can be used within external game and realtime projects, A standardised Post pro exportable open source engine that supports Depth of field (real world camera controls), Bloom, Blur, Motion Blur etc etc. By building a unified usable by everyone style post process engine like Yebis 2 but OpenGL GLSL based would mean even if people are using there own realtime engines for their projects we all could benefit from the post process engine and hence everyone would be able to help build new post effects to add to a generalised library for the app, In my eye’s this makes more sense than trying to build a new high quality game engine for Blender that will just eat dev time, let people build their own engines and just use Blenders realtime Post Pro Engine with their projects. Something i was going to ask about anyway was a cut down version of Cycles that does Ray Bundle tracing as said above for realtime engine uses. The following links are very good example’s of how high quality / Screaming fast such a tool could be:
Adaptive Ray-bundle Tracing with Memory Usage Prediction
Obviously this was a good match between Valve and BF Object creation can be lucrative it seems.
So when will Blender also be available for all platforms in their “Software” section? 2 versions would be great, latest stable version and nightly builds.
Feels good to have facts vindicate the predictions & opinions made back when it was first mentioned on the forums… especially in light of the strong backlash from some quarters that was levelled at some of us. Not only did this end up bringing a decent sum of money into Blender (a man-year of developer effort is not cheap) but we have confirmation that the “Main focus will be on good tools for game artists” rather than just generic development. I predicted the former and expressed my opinion the latter should be the way forward (as did others), in spite of & in the face of some strong opinions to the contrary.
Not a “told you so”, more a sense of relief. It can take the wind out of your sails when something you believe to be the best way forward is slammed so heavily. We already lost one talented forumite to the arguments that stemmed from that (xrg of GSOC Painting Branch video fame).
Possibly, possibly not. The developers hired at this point are focusing on features for “game artists” not “game developers”, but there is the explicit acknowledgement “something” can be done in regards to the BGE… we just don’t know what it is yet.
It will be interesting to see which topics will be given priority. The way game artists work these days it feels anything relevant for them will be great even if you are not into making game art. Modeling, sculpting, baking is relevant for all…
Ah but blender is cross platform and xnormal is windows only…so still a good idea to at least get blender up to xnormal feature set specifications when it comes to baking. Then people will have a (decent) baking tool that is available across all platforms.
Right now blender’s baking is pretty bad. This is mostly due to the fact of not having cage baking.
Baking could also be improved by have anti-aliased baking.
