Antonis Ryokatis (Psy-Fi) is also not seen since months on the pipermail 
Does someone contacted him?!
He worked during Gooseberry as developer. As they had to take the shortcut for this project, it ended after a very short amount of time and as such he couldn’t continue to work as paid developer for Blender. He is now working for Crytek.
If he feels like contributing again (if his contract allows that), he will do so. Why should anyone contact him?
Sure, but according to the article, they have in-house developers that plan to push upstream too.
They hired a good team of technical artists and developers to support them. Their Cycles coder is a former Mental-Ray engineer, who will become a frequent contributor to Cycles.
Oh shit, am I late to the party?
Because people around here feel entitled to know everything that happens in the life of past, present, and future developers because apparently privacy and freedom of choice and career should not exist for those aforementioned coders?
That’s fantastic! They can obviously see the value in having someone being dedicated to that and contributing back.
However, my question actually is, whether small and medium sized studios can see those benefits too, or if it would be useful to show them, how they could profit like that. You are pointing to one great example, but on the other hand there seem to be plenty of studios that are not doing that. Could they be made more active stake holders? Would they benefit enough to justify such a long term investment? And if yes, how could they be made aware of it?
The best thing here is to attract new people
Currently its quite a steep landing still going from knowing c++ or c# or python to coding blender itself.
Maybe youtube videos on how to get started coding blender. (download this do that install this next do that …).
Mainly focus such videos on 2 groups, linux and windows users.
I think the windows user base still is larger then linux, I have nothing against both they are both most commonly used.
As for comparison a lot of people are coding for fun c++ for arduino, it has a active coding related forum.
(something like BA, but just mainly related to coding and electronics).
And people find it fun to code there, would be nice if starters could get the same feeling with blender. (coding is fun)
Get Blender known at universities, programming schools, marketing design, architects, areas where 3d is used beyond gaming.
Not that gaming is bad its just a small part for blenders potential.
As for the code and 2.8, well maybe refactor it over a few dll’s and name spaces ?.
Not many programs come as a single exe, it might be easier for starters then to grasp areas from blender code so they can understand it easier.
Please let’s not have a technical discussion here. There is incremental compilation for Blender. If you only modify a small part of the code, only that needs to be recompiled, before the linking.
If that kind of topic is an issue, let the coders handle it, because they do that on a regular basis and they know what they are doing. If they see that they can make the build process easier or faster for them, they will do it. That’s why they moved from scons to cmake.
I do agree that the subject of a given developer’s personal life should stay out of this thread (and any thread related to development).
However, it brings up the point on whether there is a way for Blender to see some of its veteran developers return to active coding (and as such bring back their experience and expertise). Having even one of them come back on board would be enough to give a notable benefit to Blender as a project.
I agree. Though it is also necessary to always have at least one, preferably two, very solid full-time developers “running the ship”. We should try to make sure BF/BI has enough funding to provide a living wage to these.
But to attract new people: perhaps the easiest path is the one I took: progress from writing Python plugins to coding C in Blender itself. There are many talented plugin writers who perhaps just need some encouragement to get over the scary hump of moving from Python to C development.
Open hogwarts for blender software devs.
end.
I am not surprised at all by the decisions of people to leave. Reality catches up with you sooner or later. Blender Foundation’s grants are usually for three to six months and even the bigger Blender Institute projects usually last for a year or so. Maybe for younger people it’s nice and exciting, but for older developers such as me (I’m 33) this kind of precarious employment does not work. Personally I might have considered it if I did freelancing and blender projects were part of my services.
In Greece we used to have a joke about a guy who called his friends to boast about a great job that he found. The boss would fire him every day and re-hire him the next. It’s funny but if you take away the hype around open source, that’s exactly what it feels like.
To be honest I was quite idealistic about it but after my experience I have a way more realistic view about how it works. We are not bringing down capitalism(sic), this is a regular job, on regular software, mostly driven by a private company - Blender Institute. They make movies, they aspire to be as good as Pixar. As a side result, they contribute to a free open source software that is used for free by hundreds of thousands of people. It’s an interesting procedure, but it is not a revolution. We work, then we are more or less thrown away. If we are still within capitalism there are way more interesting and lucrative projects to work on - while we can still be employed, since older people have increasingly difficult prospects of employment.
More to the point, in my opinion it’s difficult to do any big refactoring while the institute relies on the software to make movies, which can cause some paralysis if you want to do bigger changes. On the other hand it really is impossible to work on such big projects without full time dedication anyway. I think Lukas’ project was such a case of really huge undertaking in particular.
What can I say, I think what summarizes this best is that out of Cheap, Fast and Good, you only get to choose two…
Cutting through the idealism of open source is going to be hard for many of Blender’s users, but it’s a reality we’ll all need to face if we want Blender to thrive. Want quality developers to stick around? It’s not going to happen via your good wishes and optimism. Until Blender gets a cash injection on the level of Autodesk’s products, expect big developments to be intermittent (and especially big projects to be months or years slower than you would expect from a commercial product) and experienced developers to be few and far between. Maybe some day we’ll be able to pay the bills with good feelings and internet gratitude, but today isn’t that day.
On the resources topic, I look at the development fund page and wonder if a lot more people would donate if they didn’t have to have a PayPal account (rather, they can just connect it directly to their credit or debit card (which is what a lot of retail sites are doing now).
PayPal as of now is considered by most to be outdated for starters, which is also why the number of people using them is declining. I am aware that the BF may not want to put their own E-payment option together from scratch, but there’s a number of other services now that can do that.
A good starting place to increase the amount of donations is to make it as easy and as painless as possible. Let people simply type their card numbers in along with a monetary amount for example.
On that, the argument above could also be seen as an argument as to why 2.8 should be incremental (2.81 > 2.82 ect…) rather than a giant leap, as something like the latter may just be impossible for FOSS to achieve unless there’s some major corporate and/or studio backing.
There were 4 openings for the Blender Foundation a few weeks back. I’m too lazy to dig through emails to see if Ton filled any of them or not. For software that predominately targets hobbyists, Blender does well in funding I think.
It’s still small compared to the large dev. teams employed by Autodesk and the like, but at least it will push Blender into one of its best ever positions in terms of development (and indeed, we should consider ourselves fortunate with that many slots, many FOSS organizations right now can only dream of that).
Not only is it small, it is also temporary. Of course, it is great that there is financial support, but as mentioned by @Psy-Fi, that is not sufficient to keep the paid developers around.
I believe that the Blender Institute is going in the right direction with the Blender Cloud. It is not only for development, but because of that, the subscribers are getting additional values. That seems to work rather well so far.
Not necessarily. One of our teachers back in school (around 2013) who was in regular contact with autodesk for testing beta versions told us there were around four to five people working on Maya full time, and they weren’t veterans, ie not the guys from Alias who created it in the first place. Now it has grown much bigger because Autodesk has assimilated part of the mudbox team and probably has done some hiring on top of that (pure speculation), but it hasn’t always been that huge team we like to picture. Between 2011 and 2014 maya updates were kind of ridiculous… only now they seem to have gotten up to speed, I guess from being more familiar with the codebase and such.
I want to donate. What’s the best way to do it? I see 3 options on this page. Is it better to do recurring donations? Is doing a one time payment through PayPal going to help the same as doing the recurring donations?
According to that page
Blender Foundation invites recurring donations to our Development Fund, which allow coders from the community to work on support issues or on sustained development toward specific roadmap objectives.
I guess that should answer your question.
I think that we need to ‘split the backend’ (L O L!)
but seriously.
Code the backend in C/C++ and put in many many helper commands for python,
code the front end in python and have it be very very modular.
any command is just a .py that calls C/C++ using an API.
commands can be picked up, and placed on other shelves, or even duplicated and source code edited.
I can code this right now in the bge, but there is very little model editing support code (like BVH tree and KDTree don’t accept a game mesh so you have to iterate each vertex in python to build a KDTree) also there is no recalculate normals command in the bge, and no command to export an edited mesh back to a .blend file or back into the originating scene.
That has not stopped me from using these features or writing them myself in python*
I think blender would be much much stronger if it embraced the game engine.
Example -> Tool Tips - you have a shelf full of tips that don’t care how they are triggered,
you can stick a tip to the mouse, and click on a mesh etc and use it that way, or you could drop a tool into a key binding slot
pressing that key invokes that tool where the mouse is aiming.
This way we all would become the developers (Except the C++/C backbone and GLSL/(???) )