Is there a market for custom Blender code?

I’m a programmer at a computer company. We’ve recently been looking for new areas to get into for programming, and I thought of Blender.

What market would there be (if any) for a per-project company that can modify the sources of blender for-hire. Either via Python or by C/C++. They the projects could be small (better exporting for file type X) or large (CUDA acceleration for parts of Blender). All resulting code would be GPL’ed but if there was some sort of financial kick-back, I could probably arrange for my company to do the work.

Maybe I’m just off my rocker here, but I thought perhaps someone may have some insights.

That would be great if you could get blender to work with the cheap supercomputers.
Maybe you could write to Ton or Ideasman42 and see if you could work it into a
big project like apricot/BBB where everyone (hopefully multiple studios) :smiley: with money chips in.
I think this would be a big deal, because 10,000 for a supercomputer isn’t completey out of reach for a lot of people.

This sounds great tbc. Definitely feel free to contact ton at foundation(at)blender(dot)org

hmmh, I would ask bigger studios interested in blender, that question, heck,
bigger studios interested in blender, but holding back be caused of the UI,
might be one interesting idea to look into, what with the event system re-write. :wink:

Also, notice that the studio(s) then would be your contractor, right,
so, if they want you could just be developing a in-house customized version of blender,
witch doesn’t/won’t really need to be made public, though that would too be an idea. :slight_smile:

There’s definitely a market, but I’d target small to mid size studios… bigger studios don’t give a damn about blender (at the moment).

Perhaps a better question is not “hey I can code, do you want anything done?” but rather to look at blender and find common complaints. Make a proposal… “i’ll do this if there’s enough interest. Who’d pledge money for it?”

As an example, Collada and Filmbox export/import come up a lot. Now, i would find that massively useful, but couldn’t afford to finance the amount of coding that that would take. i think you could get enough interested parties though as there’s a market for that. Say it took a month or two you’d need pledges totalling anywhere from $4000 -10 000 dollars?

I could have done with a custom tool chain to my client’s proprietry format about a year ago, but that would be complicated because of NDA and also becuase you’d like to release your work under the GPL, which would expose my client… and all that work would need updating now as they’ve changed everything!

so, yes I think there’s a market, though many clients like you to “pitch something” rather than “commision you with a proposal”
I’d just “test the market” with more specific proposals, no promises, and if you get enough interest go for it!

One point – the main sources are c, not c++.

Yeah, that’s a bad habit I have. Technically C and C++ are very different but I often use them interchangeably. I’ll modify the OP.

Back in the day I thought there was a Blender Bounty thing somewhere…anyone know what happened to it?

What I might do is create a general bounty site, with the view that when donations get high enough, my company can jump in and take care of the tasks.

Perhaps instead of a new site, this can be a feature added to BlenderStorm.org. People can greenlight a feature idea, but if they really want it they can donate to a pool under the promise that a third party developer might get involved. I suppose the money could go right to the Blender Foundation, who could then contract the work out to you guys.

For example, lots of people want Blender to display the percent complete or estimated time remaining during a render. Blender’s main developers sure are busy with that event system rewrite, why not donate some money so someone else can add it? On the other hand, I would probably wait until after 2.50 to add too many new features.

I think it would be slow at first but once a few projects are completed and people see that money = new features and more money = new features quicker, they might be more inclined to donate. Of course, keep in mind that many of Blender’s users are children and are unable to donate.

tbc++,

i like your idea, i would be interested to know if you could find a market for it…
i don’t have big suggestions but maybe you can promote yourself in the blendernation community store:

also, there is a list of companies that use blender in their work at blender.org:
http://www.blender.org/community/professionals

contact some of them and give it a go…

good luck :slight_smile:

I think there is pretty much a market for it - funding or getting funds is a different thing.

The majority of tools included in Blender are often driven by person interest which highly affects success rate and integration.

As an example the IBL function of Blender was not finished because the person working on it simply has not enough time to finish it and has other work which has a higher priority of course. We cannot live from air alone nor happy blender users.

Some weeks ago to integrate NURBS better into Blender we started a thread and found funding not that much around 3k. The issue is that also most people who use Blender here are 3D interested and not mainly CG studios with funding for R&D.

I propably would be able to get some funding for R&D from my college when the result can be guarentied to be a usable state of NURBS in Blender which than would benefit the classes I teach and thus would benefit the students.

Just NURBS import and meshing in Blender would be already great.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=133844

Are you familiar with NURBS ? I chatted with Ton view times and there is interest in this at their side as well. Dispite many peoples opinion there is no better tool to model objects in the area of products. And NURBS should be as strong in Blender as polygon and subsurf which is a prefered tool for soft and charater modeling.

I would go to him to see if you can get more information there.

Besides NURBS there is a lot to do with Blender - NURBS was just an example.

Not totally. It’s a mix of both. (A few of the sub-systems are written in C++) The core is in C though.

I’m a programmer at a computer company. We’ve recently been looking for new areas to get into for programming, and I thought of Blender.

Your biggest hurdle may not be so much to do with finding customers, but getting familiar with the code. Furthermore, if the programmers are not comming from a 3D programming background it might be all that much more of a hurdle.

And, you (as well as your client) would have to deal with the prospect that if the feature development your company has worked on is not embraced by the core developers, it may never get merged into the main trunk, which means even more work if you want your patch to apply to successive release versions of the blender code.

If you could make it work though, it might just be the start of blender’s code starting to transition to being developed by production companies supporting developers, as opposed to the underpaid devs living off of coffee. The program seems to have a broad enough appeal within the market that a scenario like that might just begin to take shape sometime in the not so distant future.