Blender users in Leipzig raised funds to hire a Blender developer for four days and have him work on two specific projects: better node interaction and Custom wireframe colors. This is the first time I've heard of our community doing such an incredibly positive thing, kudos!
I guess every Blender user has the dream of having his own developer sitting right next to him to code everything you want.
During one of the recent „Blender Beers“, the more or less regular meet-ups of the slow but steadily growing Blender user group here in Leipzig, we decided to just make that happen. So we put together some money and hired Julian Severin Eisel, who also worked for the Blender Institute already, for 4 days to come to Leipzig and work on some workflow enhancements.
In the end it was four studios from Leipzig that contributed and raised the money: blendFX, Mikavaa, Mathias Eimann and Knick Design.
The Goals
Of course there is only so much you can do in 4 days. So on Monday we had a meeting to discuss what we would like Severin to work on. We showed him some of the problems we have in Blender, what we would like to have improved, and how certain workflows look like in other software. Kay Dombrowsky from trickkiste.tv gave Severin a short demo of his Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve color grading station.
It was good to also talk about some bigger topics, like for example how an improved undo-system might look like, or how you could implemented parametric mesh modeling in Blender. Kay showing Severing his grading stationHearing a developer’s opinion about that was very interesting. Not everything a user would like to have is also feasible.
And because Severin’s current development focus is UI and user interaction in Blender we settled for 2 projects: Better node interaction and Custom wireframe colors.