al.mijn.email-at-gmail.com

As ton mentioned, another orange project would be great and could include more devs. I posted a brief post at http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=68209 on an idea for another orange project. The idea is to target at the developement of blender for special effects/compositing for film, as at the moment, blender is lacking in this area. I have found multiple issues when compositing, and when I get a chance if anyone wants, I'll post in detail some of these issues. I think though that if blender could be more developed for tasks like special effects, or animating 3d characters into real footage etc, we may be able to tweak the interest of some of the smaller studio's at least. An openmovie that could show blender is capable of good looking effects would cause some publicity, considering how complicated studios try to make this sound on an "in the making of…" video.

I suppose the area I would like to spend my time in is special effects, so that why I would like to see blender get better features in this area, but it is a large part of the industry.

MicWit

Support larger animation projects - that's a brillinat idea! But how would we go about supporting them? Where would the money go, to then be distributed to this kind of team? Through the Foundation? Or would we still need a third party organization to deal with it?
These are not posed as obstacles, merely considerations.

As for helping our current artists/developers - we now have http://www.blenderjobs.com/
and IMO, that's a huge step in the right direction.

More Orange style projects? Yes, yes! Lets do it! Seriously though, I have two ideas for projects like this already planned out, and would love nothing better than to see one realized. Of course, as I'm a relatively new face in the community, I'd not expect many to step under my banner. So, when's Orange 2 happening? For that the support goes without saying. ;)

-Ben

When I found out Google had only 3 grants available, my first thought was also to find extra budget to fund (some of) the others too. In the end I thought it was better not to, for a couple of reasons;

- it's Google's show, they've set the conditions, attracted students, and coordinate it. Their main goal is to get new people into open source mostly. They won't be mad at Blender if we pay own grants, of course.
- if we (community + foundation) want to pay developers, then it could be organized in a much wider context too… like; why only allow students to participate?
- currently Blender is still mostly a community/volunteer project. Apart from me (ok, the exception ;) nobody gets income from the Foundation to develop on Blender. Organizing professional & paid development is important, but when the Foundation starts paying people it might frustrate relations with volunteers. This is something we really should be careful with.

Instead a couple of alternatives exist;

- make sure we attract companies to hire blender developers for projects, and universities to pay students graduating on Blender related topics.
- support larger animation projects/studios, like the Plumiferos team. The could really use a couple of in-house developers, and blender would benefit from that enormously.
- help our current artists/developers to get into business
- organize more "Orange" style projects, and involve more developers for it next time too. (such projects can be world wide even, no reason to limit it to amsterdam)
- I could also use assistants yes, and creating a job for someone to work on support and facilitating developers (like fix leftover bugs, write docs, etc) would be very welcome. But expensive still…

Other Foundations, like Python for example, have a special fund to grant people to work on projects for a while. This can be for students, but also for companies (the employee's wage then is covered for a while). I like this model, but for that we don't reallly have a lot of money available yet. Definitely worth working on for the future too.

BTW: all rejected cool SoC projects were contacted, and most of them confirmed they'd love to work on it anyway, it will only take a while longer to finish then.

-Ton-

I already have the Blender Professionals Portal being worked on and have the domains setup to http://www.blenderpro.com and http://www.blenderprofessionals.com . I may be able to set up this as the first thing to be available on the Portal.

But I must warn that I'm getting married and don't have much time, SO, I'm not sure I will be able to do this. It is more likely not to be able to do it.

Will post something later when I have the time.

– Rui –

Someone shoud do a propper forum post on blenderartists…….

@LetterRip I couldn't find any link where this year's proposals are listed. Can u point to one or list the proposals here?

This year my vert2face didn't make it to soc (well i didn't expected it to), but then I got an email from google saying that my proposal has been accepted! Then 2 mins after I get another saying that mine has been rejected, the last email was a mistake. What a heart break.:-(

Anyway I hope blender will be in soc 2007. I will again try to make it then with a better project.

…And does anybody has any idea when blender 2.42 will be out? Somebody somewhere commented that it should be 3.00; wow! will it be so much more feature rich?

there's a risk to dilute our effectiveness here.

If Google went for a number of grants based on the number of proposals, trying to use 'objective' criteria I guess, it failed : this year's proposal had more good/feasible projects than last year in it.
Now if we try to remedy to it by founding a couple more projects (that are all ready) I don't think that there is any offense in it. By not acting *now* we are missing an opportunity that may not offer itself any time soon : devs with big hearts willing to bring a project to fruition aren't that many : look at how Nurbana's project drag on and on and on… while fluid just popped out of the can !

Carpe diem fellahs