At about 9:45 Ton makes a very interesting point, he is very interested to see how Blender can be changed and be improved, in order to catch up to the trends and stay relevant on the future.
It goes without saying, that this is huge dilemma that all organizations (or projects) face. From one hand you have either to chase legacy designs of past decades to ensure stability. But from the other hand without tipping your toes into new innovations and new ways of doing things, perhaps you miss out a lot of opportunities.
Personally, I think that the best plan is that Blender should be internally forked, so the current software is wrapped up and stabilized nicely, and a new revamped next gen is developed from scratch that solves every possible annoyance and nag that already exists.
This is the most safe and viable plan I believe in order to achieve the best results. Imagine if for example you say that in about 2028 or 2030 you have a totally new nextgen-Blender that has 10x times the improvements. On the contrary things just remain as they are, and by 2030 we get simply a bit of the same Blender.
I think that in terms of publicity, this has to be well advertised and promoted so a proper fundraising will be organized, for that particular purpose.
Provided that there are 500.000 people who donate the minimum amount of 10$ funds can be easily raised that way. No need to think something more complex.
Well first of I’m pretty convinced that the team in charge will keep making the best of their funding and strive to make blender the best possible, just like they did since then.
Now what is the best way to do that ? It’s pretty hard to tell, long term projects like 2.5 / 2.8 always bring fear and uncertainty in the community about not reaching their goals. And on top of that while they end up being successful these projects took a lot of time to settle, each time when they were released it’s only ~2 years after that blender starts to feel polished.
And there is always a possibility that these long term projects misses their goal, like with the first version of particles nodes, that end up being restarted from scratch to successfully become geometry nodes.
In the other hand short terms project might also miss some bigger picture…
Maybe the best thing is to have a big picture and move forward in small steps, so even if things goes sideways there is still something useful to be used.
Also this tends to avoid the emotional roller coaster, like people investing some money over an idea that will be released in 3years is probably always going to feel disappointing just because there is always a gap between any idea and the reality.
Here again moving in small steps relieves the pressure as when something is released it’s always a small step, like geometry nodes , it’s even more obvious given that nodes are module, that geometry nodes is never going to be finished and always evolving, but in fact it’s the same with everything else in blender…
Preface: I see this post as a total “yes-and” ideas spitting thing. Where you can simply say what you’d think would be cool regardless of any technical doability. Maybe it sparks a few doable ideas. Maybe something else. And if not, nothing lost.
I know it’s one of Blender’s unique advantages to combine so many things into one. But I also wonder if the individual pieces could work so much better if they were split into single optimized standalone applications.
After watching Pablo Dobarro showcase his new iPad sculpting App on Twitch yesterday and then shortly after that realizing that Maxon quietly eliminated ZBrush’s perpetual licenses a few months ago I was thinking if Blender could actually benefit from being able to make sculpting crunch polygons like no other. People already love sculpting in Blender a LOT. Why not give it the ability to super optimize it without having to worry about wrecking other parts of the software in the process.
Texture Painting might be another. Give a dedicated team the ability to try out more things and improvements without the worry to break other things in the code so easily.
What would be needed in this case would be a way to flow from one of the Apps into another. Like the GoB button for the Blender->ZBrush bridge.
Affinity Designer,Photo and Publisher also have that “send to other app” button and simply flowinto yet still separate from each other.
(edit) sorry … I think I went on a little tangent, here. Yeah, I am all for people donating more to blender to keep going but for an Open source project, I think Blender is doing very well for now. Remember - the 5.000.000 asked in the video was just an arbitrary number and not a fixed budget Ton calculated.
I think it’s also up to the users to help promote this. Donating to Blender, bei it money or code, helps everybody.