Who should the Blender Foundation hire next (if they have money for another dev)?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
#1

Testing the new adaptive sampling in Cycles recently, I think the BF should really place Stefen Werner on the shortlist of who to hire once they have the funding.

Why? He has (almost) single-handedly made Cycles 5-10 times faster in many scenes by way of committing the Intel Denoiser and Adaptive Sampling. Cycles itself has never seen such a leap in speed at any point beyond the early days, and they have greatly reduced the difficulty in creating baby-smooth renders that do not require much post-pro at all. In addition, it would be a shame to otherwise lose him to a company like Autodesk (Arnold) or Chaos Group (Vray).

Other possibilities (according to my own opinion) would be Troy_S (for his prowess in color workflow) and Alexander Gavrilov (for his ability to deliver sizable performance and usabiltiy enhancements). Again, this thread is primarily meant to offer suggestions, and I definitely have no authority to tell them who to hire. However, who would you like to see on the core team if you could make that decision?

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#2

I don’t know. Maybe Omar? His additions to the material nodes system has made pretty much my whole functions library obsolete. With the heavy hitters being involved with the heavy tasks, someone like him to handle the more mundane tasks of adding and enhancing node functionality. Maybe keeping node wrangler up to date, which isn’t updated to handle all of the new nodes (replace functionality).

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#3

I would say Monique Dewanchand. She worked on compositor and a crowd simulator. She probably is able to help to debug compositor, review Jacques Lucke’s work or handle Asset Manager stuff.

#4

Germano Cavalcante ( mano-wii ) to further improve the snap system, still a lot to do.

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#5

Lukas Stockner?

#6

Isn’t he already hired by the BF though, I thought I read something about that?

#7

A small 3 month grant.

#8

someone to take on the animation module so that Sybren can focus on usd & alembic more… still waiting for a proper alembic importer.

And yes someone for cycles like Stefen and/or Lukas

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#9

but don’t stefan and lukas already work fulltime on blender? just not hired by the blender foundation but other companies like tangent animation and theory studios?

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#10

Rich Colburn

Modeling Cloth Addon

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#11

Maybe keeping node wrangler up to date, which isn’t updated to handle all of the new nodes (replace functionality).

Narrator: And just 12 hours later, A patch appeared! :wink:
https://developer.blender.org/D7086

#12

Wow, that was fast. Sounds smarter to do it this way rather than keep updating it manually.

#13

Omar has done great work with the shading nodes, Alexander has improved/fixed the constraint system tremendously, Germano has brought a long-overdue upgrade to the snap system… and I guess plenty others I haven’t heard about. I would be glad to see Alexander work on rigging nodes/animation 2020 with Jacques, they both understand very well what users need.

#14

Lukas Stockner + Stefan Werner. Full time Cycles team FTW! :boom: :boom: :boom:

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