The Blender Foundation have received sponsorship to hire a full-time Blender developer for 9 months to work on Blender 2.5. If the project goes well, they will pay for another period to work on other Blender projects. Ton just announced that Matt Ebb (Blender coding/animation guru) has agreed to fill the position. The sponsoring party remains undisclosed ("but it's not Steve Jobs, don't worry!").
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About the Author
Bart Veldhuizen
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.
56 Comments
Congratulations ! This is a great news for everyone.
wow! awesome!
Epic Win.
Should we predict some volumetric voluptés in a near future? :)
What? Not Steve Jobs? The other Steve then?
Congrats Mr.Ebb!
Awesome news! :)
To have such a talented guy like Matt as a full time developer is another proof that 2.5 will rock!
Great news! Congratulations and best of luck! :)
That's great news!
Great news, man !!!
Please make Blender the most powerful 3d app in the known universe :)
Excellent!
This is awesome news!
Good news, from the people to the people...!!!
Super. Where will you be stationed? Somewhere visitable?
AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2.5 FTW :)
Another wonderful development! (pun intended)
At last !
He's also a great artist! It will benefit to all of us!
If Matt could implement the wavelet math not only in the new volumetrics, but also in the fluid sim for better detail and less clumpiness, that would be fantastic! thank you!
great news!!!
wowowow! great news!
Congratulation Matt! I can hardly imagine the amazing things or rewrite (material system?) you will implement when I see what you have previously done! (volumetrics and VFXs implemented in a few weeks!)
Big thank to the anonymous and very generous sponsor!
This is such great news! Congratulations Matt. I am excited about what is to come out of this for all of us.
This is good news no matter who the sponsor is.
Fantastic :) news, can we have a 'hire a coder' fund? Blender Foundation?
I know I know the blender shop. But!
*Forgot to add . Congratulations Matt :)
Congratulations Matt!!!!!!
I'm really gladd for you and for the future of Blender , you deserve it and I hope it became a
life contract :)
GREAT news ! Kudos to Ton for such a great decision.
Unbelievable, Mr. Optimize himself!
@Willem
I think I asked Gensher that already and if memory serves me well, he said that it not possible. Fluid sim is a different kind of beast.
Great News for the whole scene!
Since the sponsor wants to remain unknown it is much likely that its someone that wanted Matt out of his way asap.
What would be easier to occupie him with the development of Blender so the unknown sonsor can pursue his evil plans unharmed.
Its much obvious that one is assigned to blender development as soon as he 'knew to much' so he'd pose a problem for teh unknown powers that are behind such a generous sponsorship. Since we can rule out steve jobs we have to focus our speculations onto other who could be pulling the strings in such a full scale 3d conspiracy .
My guess was John Romero, Adrian Carmack or even the mastermind of homecomputing Jack Tramiel himself.
Great work, now everything falls into place just as planned....
(didn't mean to offend anyone with that weird story)
Congratulations Matt! and thanks to the unknown Sponsor!
Thank you to the Blender developers/artists. Hope the zspheres2, hard surface brushes, and fast, fast sculpting somehow seep into Blender.
Congratulation Ebb!
great to hear!
great news!
great News!! Congrats Matt they couldn't have chosen a better candidate.
thanks from all of us for everything you've contributed. Blender ROCKS!!!!!
BIG Matt Ebb fan here!! This is great for all of us.
Regards to the unknown sponsor.
matt is a genius
may be not the only one, but he is at the top
may god bless you, mysterious sponsor!
that's all
Great news. Congratulation Matt.
I'm still intrigued by the "not Steve Jobs" statement.
What could possibly be the antagonist of Steve Jobs? Bill Gates????
If not an antagonist was meant, but someone down the line, then I would say Catmull???
Or maybe it a similarity meant like in: not Steve Jobs, but the other similar guy... like in Linus Torvalds???
I don't know if it's better for us or Matt, but either way this is really great news :-)
I'm glad Matt Ebb can finally be directly funded for his coding efforts.
The reason the funders wanted to remain anonymous is probably because they don't want to be hounded with requests for funding, from other open-source contributors.
Really not steve jobs? Too many iphone news to beleive this :)
Good luck Matt!!!
Matt Ebb's news are always great :)
It must be fake steve jobs. http://www.fakesteve.net
Excellent. I am very happy about this.
Awesome, go Matt!
Congratulations to everyone involved (not forgetting Steve Jobs, this
may move more macs than Windows 7!)
Matt is a genius, a tie-dyed hat hacker who will surprise us all with awesomeness. Now I'm even more itching for Blender 2.5!
Congratulations! and thank you so much Blender Team!!!
Hurray! Power to the mystery sponsor. Thanks so much.
"but it's not Steve Jobs, don't worry!"
Hmm... Bill Gates? :)
Excellent :)
Wow, Matt Ebb is a genius, he's truly an artist
Congratulations to all, Matt & BF! :) Good luck man!!
Hope you enjoy unlimited supply of Blender!
Great news! I smell Radial Menu pie. :)
See what you did? Now, our expectations got a lot higher. How high?
Look up some night. Use a telescope. Way, way out there, beyond Pluto...To the Andromeda Galaxy.
Yeah, you could have kept that news to yourself and we all would be happy no matter what. Now, Matt has to live up to our expectations.
lol
its Google
I really don't care if it's Bill Gates, or Osama Bin Ladin (Ok, I really don't want Osama supporting Blender, you never know when he'll model a tower or something) this is great news, and you have to love a community and program that is so vibrant and growing.
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