Gooseberry Community Videos – Why You Should Contribute
The Blender community is starting to produce videos to spread the word on Gooseberry. Have you been able to find a way to promote the project yet?
Oliver Villar – Blendtuts.comBlender HD
Cartoon Sprint 2600
Really wish I had time to put together an infographic for the Blender Cloud. Completely snowed under at the minute :(
Perhaps if some inspirational A3 posters were made available on Blender Cloud (created by the Gooseberry team / Blender foundation), we could all just download them, print them / enlarge them, and post them up around our workplace / campus / town? That way the BF / Gooseberry team could guarantee to send exactly the message they want seen, for Blender and/or Gooseberry.
If we’re going to share the effort to those beyond the Blender community, such as places at work and in town, we might as well just save time and effort by using a more public crowdfunding platform that far better brings this endeavor to the public’s eye.
The fastest, cheapest and easiest means of word-of-mouth nowadays come through online public platforms, rather than physical public platforms. Though, I’ve already made this argument in full several times by now. Seems like BF is sticking to taking the rougher back roads for this project, which might be what’s hinders it currently.
hope blender be more powerful than max and maya after this…
I wouldn’t put too much stock on Project Gooseberry bringing Blender itself an overhaul of features. It seems the biggest offering from Project Gooseberry is developing the Blender cloud service.
We’ll probably see a few neat tools developed along the way of the project, perhaps some new addons that will help make their efforts easier, but I doubt we can expect some major new internal addition or any drastic overhaul from this.
Though, I would say that it’s not so much of Blender needing to be “more powerful” than Max and Maya. To be honest, Max and Maya aren’t particularly as strong as the third-party support they often gain. Particularly with Maya, most of its robustness comes through its acquired third-party support.
Blender can do pretty much anything what Max and Maya can do, save for some snazzy features like muscle deformation, CAT rigging, and real-time DirectX 11 viewport rendering. But what it needs most is better focus in development of its current features. It needs to see focused development towards one aspect at a time, to finish out features before adding new ones.
The biggest weakness with Blender is its scattered style of development, which often leaves some great functions lacking of some essential final touches (for instance, such as built-in layer management for scenes, sculpting, and textures). Blender’s strength is also its weakness–it tries to achieve so many different things, that it never completes any one thing.
This scattered, anything-goes style of development leaves Blender with the current ad-hoc style of UI design it suffers quite a deal from now, and as more features get tacked on without focused integration, Blender gets crowded and it gets harder for new developments to fit nicely in Blender. A great effort given towards refining existing features and better organizing Blender both in UI and internal structure.
Again, this project is already big enough, and so I wouldn’t expect this project to fill that goal’s shoes. However, further support of Blender would go towards helping such focused development in the future, should they make it a priority.
Gooseberry will bring a lot of development to Blender! http://gooseberry.blender.org/developer-meeting-pipeline-and-tools/
And Cloud Development will not take away resources from general Blender Development.
I’ve seen that list of developments. My point wasn’t that Gooseberry won’t bring a lot of developments, but rather that this is a chance to achieve developments that have long been missing. It seems to me the support would be much stronger if folks knew that some long-withstood development was part of this project’s scope.
I personally think the cloud service is neat and I love the hair and cloth simulation improvements and node based Particle system coming. I think the addition are definitely neat. They’re just not what’s been on to-do list for several years now.
Project by project goes by, year after year, but these have yet to surface. We see new services booted, and simulation improvements galore, but no simple layers systems, year after year. My suggestion was that maybe it’s time to make time for such, using this prominent project’s momentum to do it.
Though, I did completely forget that Psy-Fi stated at the BlenderArtists forums about his involvement with Gooseberry, so that does give me some hope of at least seeing some Texture Paint Mode improvements. But even this does serve my point some about what gets brought to the forefront of attention.
I have a very straight question. At the moment the amount of contributes from the community is 1/5 of the requested amount and there are 16 days left. I do no think it will be possible to get the full amount. What would it happen then? Will the scope of the project change? I gave my little amount and I definitely do not want my money back. Basically, is there a plan B?
I think the real reason we’re seeing rather slow support is that perhaps more
people are hoping for more than Blender’s cloud service.
Blender cloud
service is pretty interesting, but I personally can’t help but wonder
why it’s such a high priority, as opposed to the several areas where
Blender itself is still underdeveloped and its style of development as quite unfocused. We leap to new developments before finishing existing ones.
While the cloud
service venture is certainly neat, I get the feeling that to many folks, it’s not essential
to their lives. I don’t think it gets many people as excited as developers are about it. I say this only because I think many people would rather see core improvements to Blender itself first before a new Blender service.
Blender still has a Texture Mode from the Dark Ages of CG software. It’s nice Sculpt Mode lacks the most fundamental feature of all sculpting programs: adjustable layers. And we’re about a decade past due for an improved Material editor, complete with integrated solution for Material library and easy conversion between BI and Cycles materials. Just a few examples of developments that would probably garner this project all the success it seeks from Blender users.
They want to see sign that Blender will focus on completing essential Blender features before moving on to the rather grandiose and trend-seeking developments. I get a strong feeling that with many folks, there’s a silent consensus of, “Why should I help give Blender Foundation €500,000+ for this ambitious project when it won’t even ensure me immediately seeing what I need in Blender the most?”
Perhaps if Blender Foundation gave some promise to such long-awaited
development for Blender, as a result of this project, Project Gooseberry
will get farther along. Such an announcement would promote itself.
Don’t forget, Asset management, better physics, Veiwport performance, Cycles optimizations, and perhaps the most important “core feature” of all, Depsgraph overhaul, are already slated for the project.There’s nothing “Trendy”about those features, although you might call physics that if you like.
And there’s no limits to what could happen with the rest of blender- I’m sure a slew of things will be improved along the way.
Bottom line,a successful Gooseberry will improve blender more than a failed Gooseberry.
Plus we will have an epic open movie to learn from.
I really don’t understand the negativity generated here or elsewhere, does anyone stand to lose by this project? would it even be possible to create a perfect project that addresses every weakness in blender?
or is it just easier to criticize something then support it? I believe that the project will result in a better (not perfect) blender for everyone, and that’s all (or more than) we can really ask for in any case.
so be positive – it’s going to be a great experience!
I’m not a Blender developer, but I’m a developer myself so I fully understand if Blender has some problems, every software has.
But remember that Blender is a monster opensource software and every new features or improvement requires a budget and people/developer to have the work done.
I didn’t give my small amount because of the Blender Cloud, I did because I think the Gooseberry project would help in giving Blender more visibility so more sponsors in the future, so more money to maintain it and improve it.
In the case of Blender, opensource doesn’t mean gratis, it means that it follows a different commercial model.
Gooseberry to me is a good idea, a proof of concept, a challenge but also a very good advertising campaign to guarantee the future development.
Said that, I would like to know what’s the plan if the community fundraising campaign won’t bring the requested amount. Is there anything else that can be done to make this project goes even without the requested funds?
There’s a difference in pointing out a negative point, and being negative.
Being negative would be me doing something like claiming that I said much of this last year. And the year before that. And the year before that. And by current indications, it seems like I might be saying this much of the same next year as well.
Pointing out a negative point, followed by a positive suggestion towards solution, however, is entertaining the prospect of prioritizing improvement.
Improved simulations, nodification of more parts
of Blender (particles, modifiers, constraints), viewport improvements (OpenGL 3.0, etc.). All useful stuff, but
These are first-priority for the project, but not to the Blender user who uses Blender daily. Still no integrated layer manager, no Sculpt Mode layers, no improved Materials organization, no
improved rigging toolkit, etc.
Unless you make your living chiefly knocking virtual buildings down in neat ways using physics tools, chances are, you make your living using modeling, sculpting, texturing and animating tools far more.
My point overall here is that we see rare opportunities of great focused
development invent reasons to focus on other rather second-priority
aspects before we see long-standing first-priority aspects get passed to
the side.
What does one stands to lose by this project is yet another opportunity to finally eliminate some things that have been on the to-do list for many years.
I don’t propose a project that addresses every weakness in Blender–only weaknesses that persisted longer than five years but we use everyday. We don’t use physics simulations every day. We all use layers everyday.
I don’t even propose that this project stops with its priorities in development–I only suggest that we see added some more long-standing developments, which have stood many years in waiting.
We’ve got the biggest focused team development
effort yet–knocking out some of those to-do’s might
would add greatly to both the scope significance and the financial backing of
this project.
Still, I cannot have a straight answer to my straight and “maybe” unpleasant question, what of Gooseberry if the funding campaign doesn’t work as expected.
– Try to get money somewhere else?
– Simply delay the project or re-assets its targets?
– Try to get more people on board (free work) e.g. to help creating assets, maybe contributing with their machine power to reduce the whole cost of the project?
Maybe this is a question for Ton Roosendaal?
Yeah, it’s a question for Ton. Why should I know? I’m not a developer on the team.
Brian, that is not true at all.
Gooseberry will bring a lot of development to Blender! http://gooseberry.blender.org/developer-meeting-pipeline-and-tools/
And Cloud Development will not take away resources from general Blender Development.
Is a smoothly-integrated scene layer manager potentially something possible to expect from any of those developments?
My main issue is that, if the areas that need improvement are already known (the improvements listed on the Gooseberry page), how come a feature film is needed to solve those problems? This is a honest question as well, as I have no clue about development myself. If Gooseberry is entirely about developing Blender, I would prefer all the money go into development, not paying for artists to make a film I’m not really interested in seeing. Also, thanks very much for all the development you’ve done for Blender, I really appreciate it.
The main reason is that isolated developers can never make great tool for artists – they need to work in collaboration. The open movie projects have always been an amazing incubator for Blender advancement. Having developers work along artists gives them super clear insight in to what needs to be done. You simply cannot remove the artists from the equation.
Thanks for the reply :)
i don’t see why you’ve made the assumption that the blender cloud is ‘the thing’ coming from this.
I never said it was the only development–just one of highlighted priority. I brought it up in telling that other developments are taking a back seat again, and maybe bringing some of them into this great endeavor would improve this campaign’s support.
i know what you were saying though everything i’ve seen about the cloud in this campaign hasn’t been “hey lets make and improve the blender cloud” but is saying “signing up for the cloud to support this project gets you access to this cool stuff.”
i wouldn’t really even say it’s a blender program development, at least from my understanding, it’s just what they’ve made in order to easily distribute and give access to what people are actually signing up for when they sign up for the blender cloud.
aside from the blog post that Thomas Dinges left you a link for, i haven’t seen much talk at all about what they’re really planning to improve in blender over the course of the project other than to say that this project is lined up to take care of plenty of things that really needed to be taken care of.
I never called it a Blender program development–I called it a development. I know it’s not a new feature within the Blender application itself. My point isn’t how much work will go into the Blender cloud service, but how much priority is going into it. The focus is what I’m addressing.
As I’ve stated a few times, they should continue with the Blender cloud service, but it’d be great if they made a better effort to address some other more important developments as well. It’s not often we have a team of developers gathered with a single purpose with Blender development.
And if folks saw long-awaited features addressed by Gooseberry, the support would better
rise. If this project could end several years of waiting with even just a few missing core features, I think it’d gain more people’s incentive to support it.
It doesn’t make much sense to me to beef up the physics again before handling an improved Material editor that should’ve been here several years ago by now. Keep the cloud service, but bring in other priorities as incentive to support Gooseberry.
And since nobody has talked about all what they plan, but we have a list so far of some of their aims, I’m simply speaking up here. Better now than later.
I guess it’s somewhat of a personal opinion of what constitutes “Core
Features”; the targets for gooseberry happen to be some of mine ;-)
You can’t just list your personal peeves and make them “our” priority
That being said, There’s a lot of room for improvement in some of the areas
you mentioned, but there are also a lot of strengths.
the animation system is really pretty good, and will be better with the deps-graph and view-port fixes.
The materials system is great – try using maya or 3ds
max and see if you like it any better.
Your right about the texture system but these things are somewhat involved and are in part hard to solve because of the multi editor approach of the ui.
About the layer manager, there’s been some design tasks about it, but it’s
more complex than you think; any new system is going to break the old
one, and require reworking a lot of other things that work great; such
as render layers, bone layer and so on.
I didn’t list just my personal peeves–I tried to list stuff that’s been general request for years. The kind of stuff you’ll read often about at BlenderArtists discussions of Blender’s shortcomings, improvements that would otherwise be used daily.
As for the layer manager, I’m aware that designing it is complex–I even identified a big reason why it is: Blender’s development is too scattered.
The result has been this ad-hoc UI which really was a temporary solution to start with, now feeling the strain of design limitations as more features get tacked on and no focus on better integration of existing features is done.
Which is precisely why I suggested that it’s better to take advantage of an organized effort such as Gooseberry as opportunity to do just that–focus of finishing Blender’s more basic features. Even if that means taking a better focus to Blender’s structure.
But I’ll leave the issue alone now.
i’ve been trying to promote it around deviantART since it seems like there would be a lot of people interested in this kind of thing on there.
i may have gotten deviantART’s director of community relations on board with promoting it to the deviantART community.
I hastily made one last week in Bahasa Indonesia, for our country’s local funding campaign, http::/vimeo.com/adhi/gooseberrypromo . Slightly different message, because not all of us has Paypal/CC, or in it for the cloud (me included).