Remember this?
What you’re doing is fine, it may rub some people the wrong way, but it’s not a problem.
Your reaction to people being rubbed the wrong way is making the situation worse. The best way to get out of a hole is to stop digging.
5 Likes
Yep, it’s just hard to ignore that.
Actually, you know what, I don’t like to sell it like that indeed. I would prefer to just code in peace, don’t manage a store, don’t care about advertising, etc. But I tried:
- coding for free: Works as a student who is happy with noodles and 10 m², harder on the long term to pay bills, etc.
- coding and get paid by donations: got 200€/month
I think a 2x speedup of Cycles is not so easy to do and is worth something, I’m open to suggestion if you have a better idea on how to be able to live and code.
3 Likes
I like the idea of sharing your work the same way Blender is shared to you. I like what Blender Foundation is doing. People working there earn money. I love what this guy is doing: https://hdrihaven.com/p/about-contact.php He is making money. I like those values.
2 Likes
Just keep coding, and working towards ways of showing other people the value in your product. You have received mostly positive feedback and a fair bit of sales. It’s working, just focus on the positive and ignore the negative. Show what is good about your offering, and let that stand for itself.
2 Likes
This can back fire as well. There may not be anything stopping you from selling the stuff, but there may not be anything stopping people who buy it to re distribute it freely as well.
2 Likes
I opened a patreon page, got 3€ for 200+ downloads in 1 week of my work. I also like those values and I’m also a donator of those projects on patreon since the beginning. But I like to eat and sleep in a warm room even more and I don’t have papa and mama paying for that.
4 Likes
I know, I took a risk, I will just go back to a normal useless job and you will never see me again like many other devs. But at least, I would have tried. But actually, I’m also well surprised until now. All my students and the customers of E-Cycles (2 already got the code) could have even sell it…
Sorry I took time to answer you. The viewport is slightly faster, but not much. The problem there is that doing one sample at once is very inefficient on GPUs and updating the whole image every time is also such a bottleneck, that it makes any improvement invisible in the end.
I somehow getting a feeling, Mathieu is good-hearted guy.
He is just trying to making a living of his skills and effort he have put into so far. He might have tried many different channels, but probably it didn’t work for him from the life situation he is in (or were at those times). You simply can not give out of an empty vessel.
Life itself is a very rough ride for most of us.
And certainly, he is not trying to get super-rich by providing weekly builds for a month (or a year long) for the price he makes it available. Maybe making the source code a bit obscure perhaps offended some of the community members and a bit concerned. However, we as a responsible community can also come forward to help him or guide him in a more meaningful way.
I geniunely want to help him, if I have all the means… because, I have seen the worse.
3 Likes
That’s perfectly fine. You’re completely within your right to make money from your work. It was not my intention to make you feel bad. Just a simple question that I didn’t quickly see an answer in your FAQ post in this thread. So I asked. No other implied meaning or criticism. Just a question.
2 Likes
Ehhh, keep up the good work mathieu. If you didn’t do this, nobody would have the speedups or training/knowledge you have passed on. You’ve clearly stated your intentions with this. Can’t wait to see what else you come up with!
4 Likes
In any case. The question has been asked and answered. It might be nice to have it added to the FAQ so we don’t have to hash it out a third time, but that’s @bliblubli’s call.
For the immediate conversation, though, discussions related to the cost of code, the GPL, and personal branding are probably best for another thread (or PMs).
1 Like
@Arindam and @Happycamper I hope it will work, I have some awesome ideas that just need time 
And some of my students even did better than me out of the E-Cycles code, so who knows, maybe there will be new devs soon
6 Likes
Wow. I thought Blender had passed the phase where people questioned others why they try to make money with it. Your product is worth something if others say so, and are wiling to pay to buy it. It doesn’t matter if it’s one line of code or ten thousand. I also don’t see any difference to the Blender market, why is it okay to sell an addon or a 3D model you made with Blender, but not something more deeply integrated into it?
To be fair, I also didn’t really understand what was being sold here when I read the first post. @bliblubli : I think you should more clearly write what you are selling (a fork of Blender) in your first post and your Gumroad page.
3 Likes
Oh and I find your speed improvements insane! But since I render on CPU not GPU, it wouldn’t make a difference for me.
If I may offer some constructive criticism that I think will improve your pitch, @bliblubli? First off, I DO think you are an honest person who just wants to be compensated for your hard work. There’s nothing wrong with that. 
In my opinion, however, your delivery may be causing some apprehension.
Reading your first post and skimming through the thread, I’m still not entirely sure what you are offering, and I’m left with the need to ask, “What’s the catch?”. You make a claim about faster rendering. Then there are some links to a monthly payment plan for something, and then you’re talking about some kind of course. It reads to me like a snake oil pitch.
Is this a course where you teach people to render faster, or make a custom Blender build?
Is this a more efficiently programmed version of Cycles?
Is this an integration of some rendering algorithms based on some new scientific paper?
I’d recommend you rewrite the first post with a concise explanation of what you are offering… Right at the top, above your bar graph and claims of x% speed up. Streamline your post by getting rid of irrelevant bloat like the links to the benchmark file and to the benchmark page for your GPU.
Keep it simple:
- This is what I offer (ie More efficient Cycles code)
- Call to action
- Here are some features/benefits (ie Faster render times)
- Here is a graph showing render times
- Click here to buy
-
- FAQ in a separate post
In my opinion, the community will be far more receptive to that clarity. Either way, keep up the fine work!
6 Likes
It seems like you’ve developed some amazing improvements and optimizations. It’s ceazy to me that people see a problem with making money for your hard work and expertise. I think that legally you’re obligated to share the code. But who here is going to pursue legal action in court to make you do it?
How can it be that one person can speed up cycles by the factor 2 and at the same time the foundation as far as i read here rejected his code?
I get it that development is a tricky process and the people involved deeply sometimes can’t react well to outside interference simply because they have other plans / visions, but this is should be the topic (if any) and not questioning bliblubli for selling his work.
I have the impression the blender devs work very thoroughly, which is a good thing, but it also can be inflexible: e.g. scramble distance or the dogma that there will never be any secondary light caching
I know this is a can of worms, but blender really should get a proper plugin system so devs can sell or give away plugins (modifiers, render plugins etc.) without having to make a branch every time they want to implement some feature deeper then the python api.
5 Likes
i understand the cynicism here, but some of the comments are getting pretty snarky. i’ll attest to the speed-up of E-Cycles, i’ll do some screen grabs confirming render times when i get the chance.
as for the other monetary issues, i must admit i don’t follow all the technical ins and outs of licencing etc,so i’m a little confused - are people saying that if E-Cycles was a paid add-on that was installed and took over when the F12 key was pressed, it would be ok - but because it’s integrated into a full build, it’s problematic?
Thanks to all for the constructive criticism. It’s indeed hard to have the necessary distance to see what you see when you had your head in the code, builds, fixing bugs, etc. So @cgCody it helps a lot
@Zsolt, I have some ideas for CPU rendering. In the meantime, my improved simplify AO trick is in 2.8 and CPU rendering also benefit from it. So you can have the improvement for free.
@oaschwab thanks, indeed nobody because I do share the code.