Since 2004 I´ve been working with and earning money with Blender. I´ve introduced
Blender to the big (doubting) companies for years, ending up with results that earn them
money every time, and eventually made them believe in Blender too.

I think most of the credits should go to the coders behind Blender, they are the
ones to make it work in the end anyway.

I´ve been delivering work to Tuborg, Carlsberg, Dong Energy, Post-Denmark, Hugo-Boss and numerous others for years using Blender to visualize the products of tomorrow. And yes…while being hard work, it has brought home tomorrows dinner and todays breakfast.

I remembered the early days of Blender when I was personally ridiculed for using Blender in my works
rather than 3Dstudio max and Maya by my fellow artists, I was ridiculed for years and years, but always
knew that they just where “fanboys” and didn´t have the capability of looking at the works from a serious point of view rather than “fanboyism” since they “knew! I used Blender for my work, but that never stopped me in any way.

Open Source software where they way forward, and the money and my lunch proved it. While I may not be rich, It did bring breakfast on the table and the customers where satisfied with the end results every time. My peers are not laughing any more.

4 years ago, Blender usage in Denmark where 1 percent.
Today it is 20 percent. We´re getting there.

becauce of the dangers, sorry, my english is not that good..i am not shure what would differ to the last financed round.
i think the main thing is, that blender should keep indepented in its main development.

blender is so quick in its development, so we dont need to hurry.
maybe its not that good if there are to much dependencies and it grews to big.

i trust ton, he will raise the blenchmark:)

blend on

I think that if the Blender Foundation decides to go for the money it SHOULD be spent on technological advances although the hologram idea above is a bit too futuristic probably – however, an interesting idea could be to advance rendering technology in some way – then Blender’s renderer would benifit as well and could potentially lead the way for other renderers (not neccesarily only open source ones) instead of following in their footsteps which is what it appears to be doing at the moment. Photorealistic rendering for instance nowadays is getting old and is based mainly on old technologies like raytracing and global illumination etc although many attempts have been made to speed up the process and to produce better results – but I think that the underlying architecture could be improved on maybe with a more up-to-date technology in the same sort of league as global illumination was a few years ago when it was first invented. A project could be created with the following goals:

1) To Increase realism of rendering by investigating newly discovered subtleties of light transport etc… (in fact – some things have been around for ages that are still not included in renderers – even einstein predicted light distortion around gravitational feids for instance which has since been proved)
2) To increase interactivity between the rendering process and the user creeating a better pipeline for workflow (at the moment you basically have to keep rerendering scenes – this could be improved!).
3) To increase the speed of photorealistic rendering and so pave the way for proper realtime photorealistic rendering on graphics hardware.
4) To make high end rendering and cutting edge technologies accesible to the everyday user and not just to scientific communities – and for free!

I’m not sure how animation could work with point 2 there – but my guess is that there would either have to be the option of running a separate renderer for animations or that some interactivity could be automated requiring the user to only be around for the more important parts of the pipeline such as post production etc…

Unfortunately, I can’t voulunteer out any time to help as at the moment I am a busy college student – although if such a plan were to go forward and get widespread reasearch in universities etc I could probably help my local university in some way and perhaps become a leader of research in this field in future when I finish college.

Anyway – whatever the Blender Foundation decides to do, I hope it will be good for the whole community – but I also hope that if a suitable project cannot be thought of, they will have the good sense not to grope for money or anything else that is beyond their reach in the circumstances although I’m sure something suitable COULD be thought of if time is spent on the matter – and especially, technological advances could be a good way to make history, after all, Jim Blinn didn’t get famous for nothing!!

-epat. :)

Yeah very nice! That could be quite interesting. Rendering audio while rendering gfx! Neat! :)

Using nodes for adding effects to sounds is also a very interesting idea. There is ne sequencer at the moment that works object based and that’s Samplitude. (in future there will be Tracktion3). All other applications work with a classical mixer aproach using channel strips where you can alter sound like adding dynamics and effects or send to buses and aux’s.

Blender could become a new object based sound creation tool that renders audio snychronized to gfx motion. In some games you already see (or hear ;) these effects – just have a look at ArmedAssault where they use audio occlusion and muffling in dependence to the listener-sound object-vector and geometry inbetween.

Well, I am currently evaluating this kind of technology for my company and I am willed to provide more infos and concepts for Blender.

One additional thought: Just think of running Blender as a VST or AU-Plugin in your favourite sequencer for managin 3D-sound placement and dsp-management for your film production. (just one possible way to go)

Your sound idea really sounds fantastic to my ear. I am not a sounddesigner, but I just imagine the possibilities for creating sound inside of Blender animations. I am thinking of virtual microphones like virtual cameras, which would record sound during the render process. This recordings could be the input for a surround system. It could be done with nodes and maybe there is even a way to integrate max/msp/jitter.

I see you are talking about how to make Blender a better professional tool but let me introduce another idea.
I’m a Computer Science teacher at a High School in Peru, South America. For several years (about 6-7) I have been teaching Blender in Graphic Design courses or workshops.
I think Blender is a great tool but its ‘look’ is too complex for beginner teenagers. I use to start with another simpler software as anim8or (Windows only) to teach 3d modeling techniques but this tool is not ideal either.
Furthermore after deal with anima8or I have to re train my students to jump to Blender. Sadly not everybody is so patient for this (sometimes) long process.
I would like to have a ‘Starter’ or ‘K12′ Edition of Blender for schools where ‘less is more’. I think it would make Blender a better teaching tool.
Anyway, Blender is great. Thanks to all of you who make Blender possible.

Daniel