Blender Goes Open Source

Christoffer Green writes " This morning, the NaN shareholders have reached an agreement on the conditions for a new future for Blender. In general it means that the Blender Foundation can execute it plans, to continue developement as an open source project." Perhaps some ambitious soul will bolt a reasonable interface onto the 3D app.

I used to use Blender...

[I.T.R.A.R.K.]

...back in the day when I was but a budding 3d artist. After a four year break, I felt it was time to hop back in the saddle and give it another go.

Blender itself was easy enough to use. Don't let the vast array of buttons get you down. It's really not that hard to learn. It will take you an hour. Two tops.
The real problem arose when I started getting serious about my 3d art. Don't get me wrong, Blender is a nice program for beginners. But for anyone who is serious about 3d art or animation, Blender doesn't cut it by a long shot. Even Bryce 5 produces nicer effects.

I really hope the OSS community can do something for the program. Afterall, look at POVray. That was one sweet program, considering that it too was free.
In the end, though. My employers demand the best. So I'm sitting here hammering out models in Maya 4 [aliaswavefront.com] with the Renderman [pixar.com] plugin, or 3d Studio Max [discreet.com] with Cebas Final Render [finalrender.com].
Check out the girl [finalrender.com] on the Final Render site, or the Gallery sections and you'll see what I mean.
Blender was a pretty sweet program(And you can't beat the price), but it still has a long way to go before professionals will even begin to take it seriously.

Time to open your wallets?

[proxima]

$95,000 USD is fairly cheap to move all of Blender's IP into GPL. Ton's proposal [blender3d.com] for the Foundation didn't explicitly state (unless I missed it) how the group would obtain the starting cash. It outlined a membership for exclusive offers.

We should keep an eye out for the Foundation to be set up and gathering capital. I would also be curious to see any big corporation (Red Hat, IBM, Mandrake, etc.) donate a few thousand each to the cause. It used to be that the best way to support Blender was to buy the manual (which I did, VERY nice looking btw), but now we'll have a non-profit organization handling the continued development and support of Blender. 'Tis a good day.

This is great in the long run.

[minus23]

If we can get a "banner head" in the 3D open source community it will do great things. There is currently the "Wings 3D" project which is a work off of sorts from the Nendo software. -- I believe that given a long enough timeline opensource solutions can surpass the solutions we have today. -- It just becomes a matter of how long that timeline is. -- Anyway... I use Mainly Lightwave 3D.... but if the opensource comunity can create a competitor to even the very largest packages... (Maya, 3DS, XSI, Lightwave)... then it can only do good things to the pricing of these applications as a whole. --- The next few years in 3D animation are going to be exciting even without the opensource trends... but these projects... (blender,Wings...)... I think are going to make things even more interesting to the industry as a whole.

Re:Reasonable Interface?! Have you used Blender?

[Bonker]

I agree with Taco, too. The interface of blender, when compared to other modeller's interfaces, sucks donkey balls.

It may be very quick for someone who takes the time to learn it and become one with the app, but as someone who's sat down with several modellers over time, yes, including candy-coated Bryce, it's almost unfathomable. The icons are meaningless, the tools are painful to use, and the vast array of options given to the user make absolutely no sense. It wouldn't be so bad, but understanding of all these is required to do anything at all in the modeller.

I've spent quite a bit of time [furinkan.net] with different modellers, but when I tried to do something so simple as to create a rendered sphere in Blender, it took me almost two hours to figure out that the reason my image was coming out blank was that Blender does not provide default lighting... like every other modeller out there does.

Blender can and has been used to create some fantastic graphics. I'm so glad that it's been open sourced so that development can continue. As a graphic artist, however, I strongly encourage the design team to *completely* revamp the interface. It may what programmers want, but it's definietely *NOT* what artists want.

Re:Let me just ask you.

[SirSlud]

I have a job.

I'm not going to be specific to Blender here.

We dont cheer when businesses fail. We cheer when a business fails, but the product it made has a chance to keep living. Its ludicrous to lament the loss of jobs (which are replacable) but ignore the utter waste of energy and money that went into building something that fails because it wasn't marketed properly.

Software has a very low physical barrier to access the tools to build and maintain, compared to traditional goods. When Coke fails, its implausible to see a group of people want to keep making it in their basement. But with software, if it can be done, and people want to do it, why the fuck not?

If anything, it demonstrates how the business world often gets it wrong - if business fail because there is no demand for their product, how on earth can you explain our happiness when products that have the chance to fall into the public domain when the business fails?

Newsflash: sometimes, its because those people losing their jobs deserved it (not all, of course) .. they had something good, and couldn't figure out how to sell it properly. (Or worse, some other company was able to use advantages other than technical superiority in order to reduce the chance of that product making money in the market place.) I dont want to live in a world where you place more importance on keeping people in jobs than actually having the fruits of people's work available to people. If I lose my job, I can find another one. If you toss out all the work I've done over the past 2 years (more likely, my lawyers or management or whatever if we go kaput), I'd feel a hell of alot worse off, personally. Our entire product might not be the best, but like any wreck, there are always parts that *can and should* be salvaged. To oppose that would be to encourage inefficiency and waste.

interface and such.

[The_Great_Satan]

I've got to come down on the "yes, it does need a new interface" side of the argument.

If you want to see my qualifications for making this statement, you can download a game demo I made at www.shizit.net. I also made a tutorial on IKA which NaN published on their site. Perhaps some of you are familiar with it.

It's true that the learning curve is too steep. The interface can be quick for experienced users since most commands are tied to hot keys, BUT, I found this was again a major disadvantage whenever I needed to use the program after a long period of not using it. There are/were only two ways to learn most of the hot keys, the book and the Blenderbase web site. Either way it can take a lot of digging to unearth a forgotten hot key command.

Solution: expand the menu system to contain ALL of the interface commands and display the hot key shortcut beside it. It would also be great if the hot keys could be reset by the user, ala GIMP.

The other big annoyance I found was tying up the left (for right handed users) mouse button with placement of the creation gizmo. The creation gizmo itself needs to be taken out and the left mouse button reassigned the normal selection duties it has in every other program I've ever used. New objects can either be spawned at coordinates 0 0 0 as in Maya or spawning can wait until the a point is selected with the mouse as in 3DS MAX.

This is great news for all Blender user's though. Good luck raising 90K, Ton!

Free as in speech but not beer

[JediTrainer]

At least, that's what it appears to be from the proposal [blender3d.com]. Looks like you'd have to pay to get a copy of the sources (but not necessarily binaries). I'm not sure if the GPL will be legal in the case that they're proposing. Nevertheless, it still seems like a great deal to me. I'd love to get my hands on that source code for the cost of a yearly membership.

And I quote:
Blender Foundation activities

To establish a solid revenue model, the Foundation will limit access to free services and free copies of Blender Creator. The web portal will be reorganised to serve this purpose. In general there will be four levels of access (or licenses) people can get.

The licenses can be defined to match standards for 'Free Software' or 'Open Source'. Key isue here is the right for Foundation Members to re-use or re-distribute the source codes, but strictly limited to projects that work within the (same) GPL structure. Challenge for the Foundation then is to establish a good services and management system, to provide a strong incentive for users and coders to regularly visit the web site, and participate in making Blender a better product.

A. Free (gratis) access
Limited parts of general user information (executables, tutorials, help files, discussion forums) will be accessible for free. The Foundation board can decide on the level and quality of free access , related to exploitation requirements.

B. Membership
For a reasonable fee, EUR 50 per year, you get access to the closed Membership area, which includes all user services, all executable versions, all source codes. The license for the executables and codes will be the 'copylefted GNU GPL' license, also known as 'GPL' for short. This allows Members to freely use and redistribute the code, but restricts building new applications with Blender codes to other GPLed software projects. Membership is personal and cannot be transferred. For companies or schools a Bulk Member license (10+ users) can be obtained for EU 495.

Mistakes in proposal

[JediTrainer]

Calculations for Revenue expectations are off. In the proposal [blender3d.com], we see that membership will cost:

B. Membership
For a reasonable fee, EUR 50 per year, you get access to the closed Membership area, which includes all user services, all executable versions, all source codes.

Later, we see the revenue expectations:

Revenue expectations (July-December 2002)

- Initial funding (community, e-shop, sponsoring): 100.000
- Member License subscriptions: 1000 in 6 months, 50.000
- E-shop revenues general products: 20.000
- Product License subscriptions: 10 x 5k = 50.000

Total: EUR 220.000

Costs:

- Website: 6k
- Webmaster / sysadm: 6k
- Full time operations (wages) 30k
- General costs 10k
- NaN Holding license fee: xxxx

First of all, 50 * 1000 for membership revenue is PER YEAR, not for 6 months. Divide that by two. That knocks about 25k off their revenue.

Where can I find a webmaster for 12k a year? Or a full-time operations staff for 60k? The site only costing 12k per year? Is bandwidth really that cheap?

I'm not sure, but these numbers aren't sounding that realistic to me. Best of luck to them - I will probably try to support them with my $$, but I sure hope they have a clear idea of where they're going with this.