Ton Roosendaal Ask me Anything is Over
Ton Roosendaal will be hosting an ‘ask me anything’ session here on BlenderNation from 1500-1800 UTC. You can leave your questions in the comments below. Ton will be answering as many of them as he can.
The focus will be on project Gooseberry, but you’re free to ask any other Blender related questions as well.
Tip: Vote up your favorite questions!
Update: The AMA is over. Feel free to continue the discussion!
Hi Ton,
just wanted to express that no matter how this discussion
goes, please remember that there are many people (like me) who don’t have a lot
of questions, but a whole lot of appreciation for how far blender has evolved
and what it enables us to do.
Thanks to you and all the other developers ever so much.
Clemens
Thanks! Your support is much appreciated.
Do you think the BF will reach the goal for project Gooseberry?
I think it’s possible. But not easy :)
Hi Ton! Thanks for everything…
Have to ask, why don’t you put Goosberry as a project in Kickstarter?
Apart from that we dutchies are not allowed in Kickstarter (yet): read my long post about that here;
http://gooseberry.blender.org/gooseberry-campaign-launched-we-need-10k-people-to-help/
In short: the campaign is about people – get their support – and about trying crowd funding via a subscription model.
Hi Ton, here is my questions for you:
Since Blender is growing with time in features, each one targeted at different aspects of movie production, and in general of graphics production, did BF ever thought to subdivide our beloved all in one blender software into a suite of softwares specialized in a single aspect? For example one for 3D modeling, one for sculpt, for video editing, for fluid dynamics, rendering, post processing,etc…
IMO it could make the developement more efficiently focused, attractive for non BF developers, and less “cascade bugs” risky, and also it could attract more people who are interested in only one functionality to be integrate in their workflow. The cycles standalone is a good choice in my opinion.
Do you think that this approach could be a fail marketing move because people could notice a bigger gap with the “emblazoned” commercial specialized softwares while at the moment people thinks “Hey but Blender at least has this other thing”.
Hope I was clear, I tried to be as succinct as possible.
Goodluck with the Gooseberry project. I hope it will get a good result or, why not, a better one than my favourite BF short movie Sintel.
I understand your thinking about easier development, but I think it can come out horribel if you have 8 standalone programs like you said it. It’s maybe a little easyer to develope but to work with? Or how do you think can this be realized? Like a link option between all the programs?
Hello Ton. I am dreaming of a Blender sculpt app for android. I have a galaxy note 10.1 and I think on this screen it could be a revolution…personally, I got sucked into Blender by the sculpting abilities and all the rich other features I am still learning. Hand – Eye coordination is one thing only reachable with those expensive Cyntic screens…or the Galaxy note!
I think it’s Blender’s special strength that it can do everything integrated so well. The video sequencer for example – which is really not that powerful – gets a lot of use thanks to the integration in Blender. Or the compositor – having it connect so well with the render pipeline is great! And the motion tracker… imagine that outside of Blender.
So – for a user point of view this is great. For a developer’s view it’s horrible. If you break one line in Blender, you might break a 100 features!
My simple stance is always “developers should have not an easy life, artists should!”. So if developers have to choose for design proposals, then it’s always a choice for user benefits first.
Haha, that’s an awesome motto!
It has always been so, the developers always rarely get the credit they deserve, at least with Blender we know who they are. They are appreciated by us all I think.
We should introduce a ‘Celebrate the Blender Developers Day’!
Great idea but it would have to be a quiet affair they’re shy creatures. :-)
Hehe :)
I always appreciated not having to switch between apps. Thanks for thinking of the users!
That’s right! Excellent attitude!
I switched from LightWave to Blender years ago because I was tired of switching the models between just two applications (among other reasons). Exactly this was the great weakness of LightWave. For example to fine-tune the skinning on a character was a real nightmare there. :-(
Hi Ton, Does the Blender institute have any plans for a larger game project? Thanks
No tangible plans, but I am well aware that we should be supporting game artists and game creation projects well. I wrote about this in the 2014-2015 roadmap article on the code blog.
And in short – there’s a whole big overlap between film and game creation nowadays too, everyone will benefit from gooseberry work!
Thanks, I pledged for the gooseberry movie and wish the team every success!
Hi Ton,
are other characters planned and if so how many other figures main characters/background characters are estimated?
will there be changes in how the sheeps look like?
How will the game devs which use external game engines (unreal4 and unity and cryengine) profit from the gooseberry project?
are rigging tutorials planned? like the dvds from Nathan Vegdahl?
can people after the gooseberry project is finalised -get free access to the Blender cloud when they give money to the development fund of Blender?
Thats a lot of questions!
– Yes there’s other characters planned, we don’t exclude anything yet
– The sheep designs were done by the teams in spare time, and should not be looked at a final. On good character design you can easily spend many months – which we will.
– I am sure game devs need sculpting, modeling, uv tools, threaded animation, opengl4 in viewport, etc.
– Yep rigging is a topic for tutorials
– Everything in Blender Cloud is free to share with everyone – also outside cloud. The subscription to cloud is just an optional service… which you don’t need to benefit from blender or our work.
– Development fund is kept totally separated from cloud. The first is ‘Foundation’ (generic public benefit), the second is ‘Institute’ (the business where projects can run and get funded).
Many thanks for the informations.
yes indeed we gamedevs can benefit of those optimizations/progressions in those areas. :)
Why would Gooseberry be interested in openGL4 in the viewport? Its needed but I am having trouble seeing how that would be part of the film project. With sculpting, there usually needs to be super strong retopology tools and the means to bake that information onto the retopo-ed mesh.
I’m sure this would really help them visualize as much of the final look as possible, keeping the artists from constantly waiting for test renders. It should help lighting artists and texturing as well.
I was wondering how other than Films etc. you see Blender being promoted for a replacement for the industry heavy weights. Background I switched to Blender full time a year ago. Up until then I had been using Maya solely for eight years. I have no regrets, but wish Blender had a better image in the industry at least perception as it is already better than Maya in many areas. Cheers Mark
It’s a long road for us this… but we really are taken seriously more and more. Read my Siggraph 2013 report:
http://archive.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/press/siggraph-2013/index.html
“The industry” knows and respects Blender a lot.
But further – I can only work on improving Blender’s image by making this program totally awesome, and by proving you can actually use it for serious productions. I believe that the only (or best) way to develop 3D CG open source is by actually just using it. Hence: Gooseberry.
I agree especially with the last sentence. I see a lot of curiosity amongst others in the industry (and less derision like a few years back). People I am in contact with are genuinely interested in knowing how Blender does things, especially rendering (Cycles has really up Blenders game). So promotion by users obviously plays a big part, word of mouth, there I think we all do our little bit.
Thanks for the response.
Another one…
How do you deal with scammers like the company from China or Cody Landon (or whatever) and his 3D Mashit stuff?
How did that end?
The only thing we could do is to expose it, we have very good google rankings.
Further – ignore the losers. In any situation where you promote freedom you get people to abuse that.
Thanks :)
so far IMO shame list could be the best way for scammers. The copyright battle between countries with different law and license will drive people crazy! Blender is not like MySQL using two side license free using GPLv3 and commercial using other. Or like Apache should be marked as “Powered by Apache” in some “Sprint Source” company to support service or specif version.It’s not easy to understand these license indeed. Who know the different between GPL and free BSD or even MIT?
Do you believe blender will become a respected professional tool after gooseberry? At the moment larger studios do not give it the respect this wonderful package deserves
Let’s first make blender stable and awesome for our own professionals!
In this regard Blender is already far more stable than Maya ever was or is.
That I can 100% agree with. Maya is a very unstable program, blender after 4 years has never crashed on me
Same with me! And maya’s workflow is soooooo slow!
…Never? I find it stable, but I do hit a bug every now and then, particularly in testing release candidates. Nature of the beast, though.
Hi Ton,
What’s the plan B? That is if no funding goal get reached?
I hope it will, just curious what if :)
Great work so far!
no plan b for now, it distracts from plan A!
It would be shame to loose all the effort because of few missing bucks :)
We just do something smaller.
Hi Ton,
Has there ever been any discussion of working with some other larger Open Source projects on an Open Project? It could bring added interest from different communities, strengthening links and exchange between projects.
Remember that Yo Frankie! Started as a collaboration with the Crystal Space game engine, but it was quite hard to merge those two communities with such a different focus (Blender being much more art focused and CS being a very hardcore development community if I recall correctly).
I would love to hear from these projects. I tried to get Mozilla or Ubuntu on board, but that didn’t result in tangible support yet. With the more related projects – Krita, Mypaint, Lux, Gimp, Inkscape, Audacity,… we know them, and we’ll be around to collaborate where needed.
Hi Ton,
I’ve got to say, first off, that Blender is probably the greatest open source program ever created. I’m so happy that there’s a dedicated development team to making it better every day, and bringing it on par with major 3d programs like 3dsmax or maya. My one question is, would it be possible to have the developers focus on creating a way to generate a realistic, good looking world setup in Cycles without needing to rely on HDRI maps or photos you took of clouds, etc. It would be nice if Cycles’ World settings had the ability to easily set up a sun that uses drivers to drive the sky texture, various cloud types and coverage, and perhaps even volumetrics like 3d clouds, god rays, etc. by using a ‘generator’ of sorts that creates the node setups for you. It seems all of the pieces of the puzzle are there, I just wonder if there are any plans to work on this. We need something on par with Vue, or at least going in that direction. Again, great job and I LOVVVVE Blender!!!!
I’m sure someone is reading this who will pass it on to the cycles team.
Or: check http://wiki.blender.org frontpage, it has a “contact developers” link.
Having more control here and more possibilities would be great! I think that’s perfectly suited for an Addon. :)
Volumes are still work in progress though, this will become easier and faster still.
awesome! We’ve got this thread going on BA discussing this. Synaglow has come up with some good suggestions regarding using drivers for the sun which control the sky texture and also add stars when the sun “sets”: Right now it’s a complicated driver / node setup. http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?319438-Procedural-sky-texture&p=2622004#post2622004
I made a little addon from Oscurart’s script that creates the driver to link a sun lamp’s rotation to the sky rotation: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?297721-Script-Connect-Sun-with-Cycles-Sky-Texture&p=2617757&viewfull=1#post2617757
Hi Ton, do you allrady know what features will be improved for goodberry ? cloud stuff of course, but i mean from blender? better video editing? more vfx ala after-fx? crowd sim etc… ?
All of that :P
Are there any plans to create merchandise around Project Gooseberry once finished?
Statues, figures, etc.
I would love to have some of the characters on my desk. :)
me too !
me three!
me four!
me six-hunddud fiffy!
Yep – I’m a big fan of cartoon/manga figures. Still have to figure out where you can manifacture a 1000 or so without needing to pay 20k USD startup costs.
Isn’t shapeways 3d printing company from the Netherlands?
Yeah. I even worked there :) They’re great for one-offs but rather expensive in comparison to mass-manufacturing.
I don’t think 3d printing was ever really intended for mass production, more for prototyping and on-offs. That said, if Blender had its own Shapeways store, models could be purchased by individuals, at any time, with proceeds going to Blender Foundation/Institute. Models could be added from the previous open projects and artists could donate their own work to the Shapeways store.
you should get a reprap ;) like me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAvXBtb9kb4
with it and Blender I got my Babiole for 1 buck
Hi, I think it’s a good idea to make a character teddy too, imagine a dragon sheep teddy, my girlfriend will go crazy…
Plushies would be good too. I tried to cover everything I couldn’t think of with ‘etc.’ :)
Love blender and been using for years. Think Gooseberry is a great next step. In terms of funding, any plans for more of a kickstarter approach with other sorts of rewards? The whole cloud and source files doesn’t particularly interest me (or I’ve misunderstood what it is), but still want to support the project.
We decided to not announce DVD boxes, or Bluray, USB Drives, or 4K things, or special collection boxes, or books, or figures… just because that would be so hard to manage… and I really hate it to sell such products to people 2 years before you can deliver it. I doubt this even legal (our credit card company doubted that).
Your best choice now: just get the 175 euro film credit. We happy, you happy :P
Unrelated to Gooseberry, I’m interested to know how you got into Open Source software before you decided to crowd fund the blender source code?
Basically, I really got into open source because my company went bankrupt :)
Check for ‘history of blender’ via google.
Hi Ton,
First of all thank for all your awesome work with Blender from the start and all the awesome work on the open movies, I would like to know if there are plans on the following topics, because I’m very interested in them.
– Distributed rendering (including bucket rendering).
– A mesher for particles.
Thanks for all your efforts!!!.
Both topics are high on our wish list.
FYI Distributed rendering is really easy with bash script. Well that is if your rendering animations. You just send different frames to different nodes. You can control which frames are rendered from blenders command line interface. I’ve done it before. It was like 10 lines of code. And even had an interface using zenity for bash. Can’t remember what I used to assemble the frames though. You could probably develop a much more sophisticated script with python that could even allow for multiple nodes working on one frame.
Hi Ton.
I’m a 3D animator but i’m working at a non 3D related job.
My question is:
Would it be possible for the blender foundation / Gooseberry project to open positions for “freelance” animators like me to work at some scene of the gooseberry project as animator? It would be really nice for portfolio and regular animation experience, and probably if you link that oportunity to the fact of being a blender cloud supporter, the benefit would be mutual.
Thx in advance
+1 I am in the same position myself and would love to contribute work-wise to the project. showreel ;)
http://giantoakstudios.com/?page_id=1032
Is that all Blender work? Nice!
Thanks, All the modeling is blender work, the animation was with various packages depending on the studio. I would love to do an blender animation project. :)
All this was in blender. http://www.giantoakstudios.com/gdie/CartoonGroup.jpg
I’m interesting in an answer to this question too. Is there any way we can support the Gooseberry project other than donating money? For example donating time and work on scenes, assets etc. of the movies?
I would like to help with assets (or other stuff) modelling.
I think this process can be set in the manner I’ll describe below:
– the main site will have the section with “Tasks”. There will be all necessary materials to complete some model. A little concept art and few reference image for materials.
– each task can be taken by several freelancers. All of them will be contributing this job freely, just to help to lower the necessary payments. After completing the task each author’s model will be judged (daily job for Gooseberry team just for about 3-5 minutes for every task) and the winner will get some kind of a prize. Some ammount of rendering credits on your r. farm (or on supporters’)
– For those who didn’t won, it will be beneficial just to put this in a portfolio
This is something we’re often asked, and I think it’s definitely a good idea. But finding the proper way to achieve it is tricky because handling a production is time consuming and handling a community is too, so it’s very people-consuming. But I really think there is talent out there that needs to get exposed and we should think of ways to make them shine :)
Timo Vuorensola has a site called Wreckamovie where directors/producers can post projects with “tasks” for people to do. He put up a request for an alien lizard language once through that site – I ended up “winning” that task and heard it actually being spoken in a trailer a few weeks later.
A system like Wreckamovie in the Blender Cloud would be great for crowd-sourcing assets and other work as long as people were absolutely clear on what needed doing.
This is what we aim at realizing using Blender Cloud. How I don’t know precisely yet.
I Imagine it could work like the Blender issue/bug tracker. Where issue is “Model the room for scene XXX”. You can follow the progress of the person who was assigned to that, but also comment on it, load things and share it back. If we (or the artist) likes the contribution, it will be used, and you get credited of course.
Version control for 3d modelling has been addressed before (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/41963/are-there-any-version-control-systems-for-3d-models-3d-data). Jon Denning also published a promising paper called MeshGit (http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~jdenning/publications.php) at Siggraph.
That’s a great idea! Maybe there should be modeling/texturing/animation guidelines so assets are more homogeneous and everything can be put together more easily…
Assorted Questions:
When can we expect a steam version of Blender? Any plans or effort made to work with other software packages and developers to create a strong pipeline between each application? (example: Allegorithmic)
Any push to toss in more industry standard features such as grid snapping? What happened to the pie menus?
Having Blender working in the steam platform is an open topic still, there’s a bf-gamedev list where work on that is being discussed. Priority was given to good FBX import/export, baking and editing normals.
– What kind of grid snap you want?
– Pie menus is still in development
I’ve answered a couple of support questions where people mistake ‘snap to increment’ as ‘snap to grid’. So I assume they want it to snap to the grid that’s visible when in front/back, left/right and top/bottom views.
You can use Shift+S to snap to grid, but people seem to expect it to be with the other snapping tools (snap to vertex / edge / face / volume / increment).
I believe he means, that blender has incremental snap, but he wants things to snap to points where grid lines cross.
Pie Menus are one of my favourite requests, the Python script is promising but it’s handling in real life is a bit quirky. Would be glad if this was to be implemented properly
As others have said, yes grid snapping thats actually based on the grid. The grid itself is used for increments, and its a much more precise way to snap…in fact its industry standard. Blender is the only application I have come across that doesnt have it.
As for pie menus, i do hope you can continue to tackle the “low hanging fruit” and prioritize on all things usability related.
Hi Ton. Is there any particular technical challenge or feature that you would like to see driven forward by the Gooseberry project? Best of luck with the remaining fundraising (and the bit that comes after, of course! :-) )
My own pet project is to make sure we have our animation system and our physics system upgraded and work together perfectly. Including Cloth, hair, particles, etc.
this i like
Just wondering if the funding drive has to end when the timer is up on the Gooseberry page? I know that you wouldn’t want it to become indefinite as to when the funding would end, but are there plans to extend it? Better to extend it a few weeks than have to change project goals?
If extending will give a good result, we should do that. I need to see more evidence for that the coming week then! :P
When can we…
Is that really stopping you from supporting the campaign?
No, it is not stopping me. But with bitcoin, we can reach more people faster with less cost.
I’m also supporting and funding NPR development. BEER to be exact. BlenderNPR.org will be releasing a Freestyle course that will also fund the development.
If I used Bitcoin, I would definitely prefer to use it because my local bank blocks charges to the Netherlands due to some fraud. I had to have them lift the ban for a day(the longest they would lift it) so I could sign up for the Blender Cloud. For future payments, I’ll likely be using Paypal so I don’t have to call my bank each time.
Wow, that’s some strange policy to ban an entire country for one fraud. I’d consider another bank ;-)
But I hear you – international bank payments can be painful sometimes.
The Blender Cloud might support BTC payment in the future, we are seriously investigating it.
You can currently pledge using just your email address (no credit card, no PayPal). Check out cloud.blender.org.
Thanks for the reply. What do you do with the email address pledge?
:) just do it… seriously investigating it and take my bitcoin
Hi Ton,
If the crowdfunding on gooseberry.blender.org does not succeed, are you open to creating a traditional fundraiser on Indiegogo well afterwards to fill in the rest of the money that is needed? A fundraiser focused on selling the movie to a general audience and not to those interested in Blender or Open Source, offering DVD/Blu-Ray, Posters etc to those that backs the project.
Regards,
Gustav
We were all set to do this on Indigogo, but for several reasons I decided it wouldn’t work.
– No animation (feature) film ever crowdfunded more than 200k or so
– Indiegogo advised us to not set the target above 500k
– Best crowdfund success is always via your own fanbase or community. We have that here, not at indiegogo.
– The only way I think we can do this is by engaging our audience directly with making the film.
Read the full article here.
http://gooseberry.blender.org/gooseberry-campaign-launched-we-need-10k-people-to-help/
BTW: check the top three film funding results on indiegogo now. We would be #3 now. That’s what people give money for… not for an open source project.
Hi Ton,
I worked with Blender and BGE for more than two years for research purposes and I fell in love with it. Now I’ll be involved in a long term project (2 or 3 years) but we’ll need to work with android too.
My question is about the priority in your roadmap to make it android compatible. Thanks for this great software!
I would love to see that happen too. But the amount of work to make this really good should be picked up by someone – or a company. It’s a big investment.
I really believe in the stakeholder principle for open source development. People do things because they need things, and they become ‘owners’ of a problem or a task. Get involved, you are really welcome!
I use Blender across 2 monitors, and I cannot imagine how Blender could ever be a genuinely productive and pleasant application on a tiny Android screen. Detailed vertex selections? Graph editor? I do hope the Blender devs do not get distracted with trying to port Blender to Android, it would be a soul-destroying and pointless waste of time for all involved.
Porting to android will also mean support OpenGL ES, which means that every linux powered minipc as raspberry, cubieboard… will also support it.
Blender always aimed to support old hardware, but even better than old hardware can be that kind of minipcs.
Have you also thought about deploying Blender Game Engine games on android?
Ouya, Nvidia Shell for example are two android powered consoles. And every android phone.
Nowadays there isn’t any Python powered game engine running on android. We have the excellent 2d library Kivy, but is more app oriented than game oriented. And has no 3D. That is another opportunity for the project.
There are also TV’s powered with android.
Sould-destroying and pointless? I don’t think so. Porting blender to andorid doesn’t only mean to model on a 5″ screen. I see a lot of possibilities on it.
There was a google summer of code to port the blenderplayer (for blender games) to android. I tried it with a simple game and it actually worked on my smartphone :)
http://www.blendernation.com/2012/06/26/blenderplayer-for-android/
Hi Ton. You have something like half of 500k right now. I guess this is already a lot compared to budgets you got from past projects, yet you did great things by that time. Why don’t you go for half or less of the actual planned Gooseberry project ? Wouldn’t it be a good thing compared to previous project ?
And I am sure that if you start and let people see what you do more than 10k people will come to support. I think that only big Blender fans do not need to see clearly and for real a piece of what they will get from this project, and old tutorials and old projects data are not enough appealing.
It’s really hard to make half a feature film, or hire people based on doing a film half… not knowing if this ends up as a full movie. You then might end up in the hands of investors, distributors or other big companies who in the end will own everything.
I really prefer this community to give out a big statement to the outside world.
Here we are! We are with many! And we are going to kick asses! :)
hey ton you the MAN!!! but we need this gooseberry, you have so many supporter if the goal isnt reach what is the alternative???
Yes, why not having propose a Gooseberry goals roadmap of what you would do for each thousand supports for instance? like Tube (which is a smaller project indeed but the campaing was clear, a goal for each determinated received part of the budget).
MAN! Come on! We will win this!!!
(But if not, I will not let you down. Promised)
As everyone I want Gooseberry Project to happen and I was wondering if anything special had been organised to get the support of other Open Source Software communities, as I think Gooseberry Project goes much beyond Blender only benefit. I see it as a creative response to all kind of industry constraints and this should matter to any artist :-)
Thanks, you can really help us with that. It’s much more convincing if the message comes from a lot of people.
That’s also why I am so happy with the team video!
Hi Ton,
First of all i would like to thank you and the developers for you work in blender.
I work in a library associated with a college and we would like to add blender books to the collection (I live in Philippines by the way). Is there any distributor, or anyway we could purchase it here . I check major store and bookfairs for it. I know we can order online (we hardly order online, they prefer it physical).
Goodluck with Gooseberry!!!
Connect with the Philippine user community?
http://www.pinoyblender.com/
As you are now Mr. Ton? :) Nice day today, do not you think?
And time for a beer!
Hi Ton, I just wanted to thank you for your great work! You founded Blender and therefore you also founded this great community! I thank you every time I open up this awsome program!
Thanks :)
Has there been any thought on expanding the Blender Game Engine so that it can natively export to Mobile Platforms like BlackBerry, Android, iOS? and Also any insight into incorporating or enhancing BGE with more tools to better compete with the sorts of Unity3D, Shiva, or GamePlay3D (among others)?
We have an Android port protype of BGE. Not for iOS though (Apple doesn’t want GPL on it).
I think this would totally rock. We really seek good developers to adopt that project.
Hi Ton,
I have a question but not about Gooseberry.Our Chinese users are eager for Chinese IME input support on Windows.I wonder why there’re only Mac and Linux support for that?Thanks for your patience:) and wish Gooseberry a great future!
I have seen this discussion come by in developer meetings online, but I don’t know the exact details. Of course it should work for Windows. Matter of kicking developers :) (OK, be nice to them!)
We capture keys directly from keyboard on Windows. Also, windows native text box supports IME input, but Blender implements its own. IME can be complicated due to interactions between OSevent systemtext box. But it is possible to implement it, just matter of free time.
Greetings, from a 20th Century Blenderhead and C-Key owner! Did you get any personal contact from YouTube or Sony, at all, about Sintel being taken down, last week?
Hey Chris!
No message came in sofar from neither Sony or YT. We’re not important probably. Or their lawyers advised to not do this! :)
All right, Ton, here it is:
Who is/was developing the Game Engine?
Are there any major improvements coming to the Game Engine?
What is the Blender Foundation’s ultimate goal?
What do you think about the Peeping Ton addon for Blender?
What was your reaction to the Sintel/Sony debacle?
Why is Blender called Blender?
And lastly, I just want to thank you for making Blender, making it open-source, and taking 3 hours out of your day to answer our silly questions. Thanks so much for everything, Ton!
– BGE: I coded the first version (up to 2.10). Now it’s many people…
– I’ve seen GSoC, interesting projects for BGE coming. Also tools are worked on.
– I hate to look at myself peeping!
– Youtube just screwed up – we had good luck showing why our work is so relevant.
– Blender is named after a Yello song
Hi Ton!
All I’m hearing about from colleagues in the games art community at the moment is marmoset and quixel’s (and others) physical based realtime shading previews, which seem to make more sense now that unreal, cryengine and unity are moving/have moved in that direction. While cycles is incredible for representing realistic materials it’s not really a realtime view. Will there be any plans to include a realtime viewing of these sorts of shaders for models in blender?
p.s. really hoping gooseberry get’s the greenlight financially! :D
I haven’t seen this marmoset or quixel stuff, but I assume it’s about much more advanced openGL support? That’s part of our massive “viewport recode” plan, which already runs 2 years…
I’m a bit worried, as it sounds like you might be out of the loop on a lot of industry applications and advancements that have taken place over the years. Being on top of that, and part of the field, not just in a blender bubble, is healthy too.
Marmoset toolbag already on their second version of the application, its been used for years and its extremely popular. Quixel was created from a plugin on photoshop which generated some of the best maps you will find from images. Since then they created a company, teamed up with some of the marmoset rendering capability and created a suite of applications known as ndo2, ddo and more. They are competing directly with Allegorithmic’s suite of applications such as Substance Designer, Bitmap2Material and Substance Painter. All very big in the professional field of 3d, also some are very accessible as well price wise. Marmoset also has a Unity version in which the rendering method can be used it real time media creation, including direct rendering from the web browser itself.
See: http://skyshopdemo.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/
The general shift has been to embrace real time PBR rendering and advanced use of shaders, whether custom or built in. Even film has been embracing real time rendering as a method for quickly making content on the fly without long render times, especially with animated and stylized content. Im afraid you guys are behind in the world of CGI.
Ton, I have a feeling that there is not enough attention in the press for this project. Have your tried to get attention through different channels such as DWDD (like BBB), Metro, Ad.nl etc etc? This is something big but without any press attention at all, this is a little strange for me…. Did you have the idea to try these different channels?
From what I’ve heard so far, Ton has been putting out a lot of messages to international press.
The dutch press isn’t interested in this – now. They will be next week (when it’s too late :)
Would you do this monthy, Ton?
Haha, answering this flood of questions must be seriously hard work :)
Sofar it’s big fun :)
Are institutions interested in supporting blender using any kind of service level agreement?
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding, but isn’t this exactly what the Blender Development Fund is? http://www.blender.org/foundation/development-fund/
Donating to the Blender Development fund doesn’t give you a service level agreement though.
Ah there we go, I read that wrong.
Perhaps this ties into my point. Could a service level agreement be something that Blender could offer to larger organisations? Or does GPL perhaps make this difficult, or is it just not being done? Or is it being done in any context?
Also, is it a bad idea for any reason?
No, it can be done under GPL, but it requires a very different type of organization. An SLA entitles you to a response, and maybe a solution, within a given timeframe. You’d need a substantial amount of full-time dedicated professionals to be able to guarantee that.
An open source example: Krita’s got KO GmbH and there are SLAs attached for a fee – http://kritastudio.com/support.html
Oh, interesting!
Dev Fund is a real donation – it’s not a service for development time or support.
Real service contracts we don’t offer – and I really would encourage a company to be starting this.
Our http://www.blendernetwork.org partnership program is also meant to facilitate it.
Hi, Ton
I wonder when the cycles becomes hybrid renderer
There are no plans at the moment for a hybrid rendering approach (Shading on CPU, Ray Intersection on GPU).
I sure wish my 24GB of system memory could be used for something.. My large scenes won’t render if I want to use GPU
Explain?
What made you choose Mr. Auvray (I hope I got his name right) for Gooseberry?
I was waiting for that one too :) yes, why ?
Because Mathieu Auvray can make it :-)
I wanted that guy already for many years, and he finally said yes! :P
Wait for 2 years and then watch his film. Then you know!
uuhh ! thank you very much sir !
Hi Ton! Thanks for doing this Q&A.
What have you learnt from the process of launching Project Gooseberry, and what if anything would you do differently if you did it again?
It goes exactly as I want it to be, apart from that we need more people to support us.!
Note that gooseberry – in its core concept – is unique, and gets exactly the unique presentation it deserves. Another time would just be another project.
Hi Ton
Why don’t have you wait a month after lauchning the website for the donation ?
Freelances can work on the movie or help in any ways ?
The freelancer question has already been addressed below.
If you mean: why not have released the website first, and then do the donation campaign?
We did have quite some startup problems, like with credit cards… these services are very hard to get activated.
The main issue was that I accepted to present Gooseberry at SXSW in Austin. Already back in november last year. A lot of publicity, people, money, booth, etc was lined up for this. So – we just jumped in the water!
Since it is possible to render either on CPU or GPU using Cycles, I wonder if there are plans for Cycles to use GPU and CPU at the same time to speed up rendering.
Multi Device Rendering is already possible via OpenCL (nvidia GPU + CPU for example), but more combinations can be added later. The non trivial part here is load balancing.
I have three questions.
1. Why “feature-length” with twelve studios at this point in the foundation’s history? Tears of Steel was the usual 12 minutes and collaborated with just one film production studio. Jumping up to 90 minutes and 12 studios is a big difference. Was it not attractive enough to plan a thirty-minute film with maybe just three or four studios?
2. The theme of the film looks depressing. A small young ram is lost and alone, thinks it might be a machine, and by the end of the trailer is crying. Do you think this is affecting the enthusiasm of the public?
3. cc:Luciano Baraglia … Why not accepting funding from kickstarter too? It’s more exposure to people outside of the Blender bubble. I can understand the desire to build up your own system for crowdfunding, but even projects like Broken Age did both kickstarter and direct funding (a.k.a. “slacker backers”) to meet their goals. They also started with a smaller scope. (see question 1)
Final remarks (especially to those of you who are not Ton): Love the project, and every open movie so far. I chipped in in a big way, and every day trying to get folks to give too in any way they can even if it’s just $1 (those little bits go a long way!) Here’s to Gooseberry!!
To point 3) Ton answered some comments above, that kickstarter does not accept people from NL yet…
1) For film makers, there’s really nothing between a short film and a feature. Doing 25-30 minutes is a very uncommon format… that will give you a lot of troubles finding theaters or an audience. More over, a feature film is a statement for film makers. The holy grail for animators.
With short film nobody can ever make money either. A feature film does have market… and that’s what we wanted to tap into. The chance to make something that will actually play a role in the media, in theaters, or on tv.
12 studios: well, i wanted 8 :) But we had too many good ones. Why so many? Because I cannot afford to fly in 20-30 people to work in Amsterdam. I cannot afford to have 1 story told in 1 style by many (beginning studios). I designed the gooseberry concept to be feasible, from start. To tap the best of the talents, enable them to make the best possible together. And help their own studios to grow.
2. If “the public” can’t look through such teasers… come on, we’re artists. There’s artistic integrity here. I’m doing this to enable artists to tell their stories, not to build a platform where people get the story they want to hear. Look at what’s succesful at Kickstarter or Indiegogo. Sorry, not my piece of cake.
3. Let someone try to do this. But our audience isn’t there. Blender users, open source fans, people who really care for Blender are the ones I want to work with, and what gooseberry was meant to be for.
Getting anonymous money from 50,000 people… maybe, but that would be a complete and total different project. A commercial project even, which I wouldn’t do likely.
Absolutely coherent Ton :-)
I get it. I really really get it. I was on the fence about asking some of these questions because they aren’t fun to ask or fun to answer, but hey, you said “anything!”
Thank you for taking the time. I feel like the vision is very clear to me now: gooseberry is truly for blender enthusiasts by blender enthusiasts.
Hi, Wray!
Hello Ton :) Will the Project Gooseberry play in the Cinemas? Or is it “only” a movie for the internet?
Adding to this question, are you going to try to get big brand theaters, such as AMC and Harkins, to play this film?
I believe that one of the ideas is to try and find distributors or cinemas, yes. I had the privilege of seeing some of the Blender Institute’s movies in a cinema and it’s AWESOME to enjoy that experience with others :)
Hi Ton! Thanks for this amazing tool you have created with this amazing people who helped a lot. Wish I could do something more than just giving money.
Q: when the game engine becomes “interactive mode”, would be possible to create interactive apps with it? Not games, but something like real time walk through, scripting for doors to open when a key is pressed or simple events.
Also, would it be able to export Linux and Mac apps?
A: Yep, that’s the idea.
Hey Ton. What is the best breakfast to eat before a hard days 3D work?
Muesli with yoghurt.
Agreed!
In order for Blender to work more efficiently as a pre-visualization tool, it needs to have an accurate optical rendering feature. As of now, it does not have an accurate means of displaying the true depth of field for the various focal lengths. What is the likelihood of Blender ever having this feature, and if so, when would it most likely happen?
I thought the Cycles render engine does this.
Hi Ton, many people in china want to support the film,but we use alipay more often than the paypal,and RMB card than visa or MasterCard,so could Blender fundation open a chinese yuan account,and we can summon people give the money quickly.
Check with blendercn.org, they are collecting money from users to get a big credit in the film.
yes ton, I own the blendercn.org domain. I and my friends fund the http://www.blendercn.org website, and I buy the cloud from visa card,and I’v called people to support Blender collecting, but we still need people give them money themselfs，and often。so, may I suggest you to think about this proposal, and we Blendercn can summon people give the money directly to fundation more often and quickly and more and more. Thanks!
Hi Ton! I don’t have any specific question, but I wanted to post my thanks to you and my support for Blender and its related projects. Keep up the great work!
The “Blender Cloud” confused me early on, but thanks to your clarifications I’m all-in on Gooseberry – I haven’t been this excited about a fundraiser since Blender’s original “rescue the source code” campaign.
Since then, instead of a wonderful tool disappearing, Blender has continued to thrive and evolve. And even more crucially, it can’t ever disappear now as long as somebody somewhere cares about it. I want to voice my deep appreciation that you continue to knock down walls between what belongs to a select few and what belongs to the world.
Hello, Ton!
Blender is evolving so rapidly! Four years ago I’ve didn’t imagined how cool it will be now.
Question: do you have any plans for implementing node-based aka “parametric” modelling in Blender? Can it be expected in the area of Gooseberry project?
The same question is with physics but I guess (heard) something about this already.
There’s an add-on in development called Sverchok which is node-based modelling. The Blender Sushi blog has some great write-ups about it.
Here are some posts on it, very cool stuff indeed:
http://www.blendernation.com/?s=Sverchok&submit=Search
Of course I know Sverchok! :) But the question is about the general code in Blender. I’m not a coder but I think it will be much faster in c++ (or how to say it?) there than as a python addon. The parametric modelling like this take a HUGE amount of CPU so it’s a normal wish to have such part in Blender itself.
P.S. And it will be integrated in the workflow (I guess similar to the choice between BI and Cycles) so this will get much more solid workflow for users.
There is really a lot of interest in this, and when someone joins the developers for it he/she will get a warm welcome.
Hey Ton,
I think it might be useful to try to get some kind of a Reddit plug. They have a massive user-base that appreciates technology and often helps crowd fund projects – could be a great way to get an influx of pledges. Maybe you could do a “I am the Chairman of the Blender Foundation and Lead Producer on Project Gooseberry, AMA”, not all that unlike what you are doing right here. We could seed it on BA and here, or wherever, and try to get it enough eyes/karma to work towards a front-page post, or as close as we can.
What do you think?
Either-way, thank you for Blender and these open projects. Cynics aside, these projects are super inspiring and are a testament to what is possible when people come together.
Thank you,
Braeden
Pretty sure Ton is already in the process of setting up a reddit AMA.
Thanks!
Reddit AMA should happen tomorrow. Will be announced soon!
Thanks Francesco, make sure you make a big post on BA/G+/BN etc. about it so it has reach and support. Just a thought, do you know statistically what is the most strategic day to post an AMA? I know there is probably more eyes on it during the working week because people have reddit open on their work computers, but on the weekend they are outside and away from the desk. This could be good and bad. Good: because there is less post competition. Bad: because there might be less eyes on it for support. Just a thought to consider.
Be prepared to answer the question: would you rather fight a [larger-thing]-sized [smaller-thing] or 100 [smaller-thing]-sized [larger-thing]s?
just checked – a Reddit person tells me that Crowd Funding is not a valid (main) topic for an AMA. But we’re rewording the proposal. Will do after this AMA is done
I would keep the topic about Blender and Gooseberry, I think naturally people will be able to find their way to the funding page without you having to directly post about it or break their rules. At the very least people in the comment threads will post the link multiple times, I am sure.
Thanks for the reply Ton, good luck!
Do you think it would be a good idea for cycles to become a raytrace/rasterization hybrid?
That is, give the user an option to Use GPU based rasterizing for the direct pass, instead of raytracing it. then sample over the indirect passes with cycles raytracing.
Rasterized non GI renders look identical to raytraced non-GI renders, but they are far faster to render.
I believe that Cycles should have as many ways to fake/approximate things as possible.
Speed is often far more important than accuracy.
No Cycles should stay pure as it is.
We can hack stuff better in Blender Internal then :)
In that case, it would be nice to have a “render engine” option the render layers. :)
So one could render the same scene with different render engines by pressing F12 once, then combine the results in the compositor.
Btw, I thought you guys were dropping BI out sometime in the future and leave blender with cycles only…. Guess I was wrong :)
Forcing every type of rendering, including unlit motion graphics, to go through a stochastic path tracer sounds bad.
Yes. I was pretty sure Cycles was created to replace BI, but before doing that it had to have all the disadvantages (Speed and features) patched up to be as good or better than BI. I thought that was the primary goal of why cycles was even created by Brecht in the first place.
That’s why, i thought, allowing Cycles to fake a lot of things by making it a rasterization + raytracing hybrid was a good idea.
First of all, I was pretty sure the whole point of Cycles was to replace BI when it patches up all dissadvantages (Speed and Features). I am pretty sure Brecht said that when Cycles was first revealed. That’s why i suggested for Cycles to go Rasterization+Raytrace hybrid way, to get the best of both worlds. Rasterization is FAR faster then raytracing (As evident in games that draw 60 fps) so that could’ve been the way out for Cycles to patch the only remaining dissadvantage – speed.
But even if BI is dropped, and cycles remains a brute ray tracer, that still doesn’t mean that only cycles is allowed for users. Blender has (Or at least, should have) a working render API. Any render engine can plug in. BI is old and slow for a rasterizer and needs to be replaced with something better. For example, the GPU based furryball render engine, which is similar, but far faster.
Meanwhile, at Blender Institute…
By the way, Francesco. I listened to the interview that Andrew did to you and it was great, but next time you should try to sound a bit more positive and cheerful :P
I tried my best, but maybe the editing process did not really let it through. You can also check out my more cheerful presentation at LGM last week :)
Oh, I didn’t know about that one. I should follow you in Twitter :) Anyhow, keep the good work!
I didn’t know about that one. I should follow you in twitter to be up to date :) Keep up the good work!
Hi Ton.
Maybe it’s stupid question but … How to become a part of team of Gooseberry Project? And also, will added more videos and assets on blender cloud?
More content will come to the cloud, next is the “Chaos and Evolutions” DVD by David Revoy. :)
I am sure most of (all) the teams will do recruitment calls when we start. Stay connected with the gooseberry blog!
I’d like to ask what animation tools are you planning to address during Gooseberry? Any plans for more mocap cleaning / retouching tools? I keep my fingers crossed for Gooseberry crowd funding to succeed (pledged my share few hours ago ;) )
I think that mocap tools will be implemented at later stage during game focus.
For now ne need better rigging tools,grease pencil,better timeline and the most important thing,they will make the graph editor the most amazing ever.
we need to make eventying animatble as well
…
Motion Capture would be a separate project I’m afraid. But I do know there’s serious interest. I’m working with a university on contributing (code) for it.
There’s a discussion going about floating panels in bf-funboard.
Are you following that?
I coded the floating panel in 2.3 :)
Unfortunately I’m not following UI discussions currently… I know they’re important. Hopefully we can get more good UI coders in the team.
Hi Ton,
just got in the cloud! :)
Was a bit lazy, this session is great idea.
1. I’ll be more than happy to support more specific development projects also! Like G/UI haha
2. Please include us for props making, week challenges, contributor of the month, etc.
3. Thanks for Blender!
Cheers
Tomislav
1) Cool
2) Yep!
3) YW!
Hi Ton,
I have been produced in the Blender 3DCG animation in Japan.
A great tool that specializes in human form animation called MMD exists in Japan.
MMD shows the possibility of new 3DCG be to easily share data and character motion.
In this project, I hope that features like MMD on rig is added.
Could you share a url of this work?
Or – just check ‘get involved’ on blender.org and connect with us.
I believe he is referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MikuMikuDance
Ton : where does that passion to talk to the cops in the US, or to hug them, comes from ?
For me USA is like one big DisneyLand!
Hey Ton!!
This question is not completely related to Gooseberry project but i have to ask this since it has been there in my head for months now.
How soon are we getting alembic support? I’m sure it is there somewhere in plans.
And i am guessing it will be needed to facilitate sharing of cached data among different locations too!
This is one area which i am sure can draw attention of plenty of other studios and they can start integrating blender into their pipelines along with the likes of maya and houdini right away!
It’s one of the key targets for Gooseberry, but it’s also one of the last ones to do (in 8-12 months?). Before we can efficiently use Alembic a whole lot of other code has to be cleaned, redesigned and fixed.
Hi Ton,
How much work will be aplied to the compositor? many users still have to use After effects because blender still misses some 2D features like specific effects filters or 2D tracking system inside the compsitor,for exemple use the data from the tracking system from footage A and apply to footage B etc.blender is still limited,and harder to use in some specific cases like motion graphics.
thank you
Sérgio Frias
I know there’s a whole lot of artists on board who will eat me alive if we don’t fix the compositor :)
Thank you Ton :D
Hi Ton, Mathieu, every one
To make a feature film you only need to last 60 minutes, did you considered this option ?
Yes, of course. But selling a movie to partner is duration related business. A feature in a theatre is rarely under 70-75 minutes… 60 is the “legal” limit I think but is not very interesting for TV’s or theatre distributors. But since the campaign and the final amount is still unknown ,everything is still open ;)
I like nice round numbers, 100!
But so is 1:00! ;)
128 is the real round number here.
Suzanne or the blue alien?
Suzanne.
Hi Ton,
Thank you very much for your work in Blender, and please, thank all the developers for the great work. Blender is such a great piece of software!
As a developer that use OpenGL daily, I am baffled to realise that Blender is running on OpenGL 2.1. Are you using only fixed-pipeline functions? That seems highly unlikely! If you are mixing fixed-pipeline functions and programmable shaders, it hast to be crazy for the engineers to develop for Blender!!
How hard would it be to switch all OpenGL legacy commands to the newer standards? Wouldn’t that improve performance greatly?
In case you try to follow the OpenGL newer standards, wouldn’t be more clever to program for OpenGL ES, instead of OpenGL?
Thanks for your time
We have a project for upgrading the drawing code. Already runs 2 years.
Don’t forget that our free software also means we have users with quite antique environments still – and they totally love it to have Blender. We’ve defined that Blender should at least run on a system that was 5 years ago (new) a decent computer to work on for Blender. Linux, OSX, Windows. Heck, we still even support XP!
For how long will the XP-support remain, btw? :)
I have spend a lot of time in order to have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2013 based build support XP.
I would expect me personally to keep it going for a few releases or well into 2015.
If it at some point holds blender back to much we can always vote to drop it. :)
Okay, I’m sure you know Doris Fiebig. She now sculpts with Blender’s Dynamic Topology, but she keeps going back to Zbrush for remeshing and other stuff she can’t do in Blender. I myself had just recently discovered sculpting and I’ve become addicted to it with the powerful dyntopo.
My question is, are you going to allocate development time for Blender’s sculpting tools?
It’s one of the most important tools in Blender. I think you can find sculpt related features and fixes in every release the past years. That’s not going to change :)
Hi Ton,
why you’ve choosen to drive the campaign on a more human/movie/cloud level, instead of a pure Blender development approach? What you listed about improving Blender is awesome but really generic, why not for example show “how new cloth system can look like, thanks to Goosberry…”. People who pledge are mostly professionals i suppose, and they’re much geared to drop money for this instead of the final movie. Really well defined technical goals would help imho.
Just curious. Thank you!
Good suggestion – we didn’t put a lot of time in sketching the results of development.
On one hand it’s also because we don’t know yet (how to make awesome hair sim or cloth). We have to find it out, investigate, try, read papers, check code.
On the other hand – a lot of pros out there really know what to expect of hair or cloth for production (and what fails now). We really have to catch up on this.
Dear Ton when Blender will get AMD (GPUs) support for cycles?
It is being worked on. I do not think we could give an estimation currently as good support requires work on both AMD and Blender sides.
AMD has made hardware and a driver available but that does not imply that it is close to being good enough for general consumption.
When AMD makes it work… we have beta drivers here that *almost* work, but it’s still not there.
– How I will can support the project Goosbery beginning two months from now? Right now I’m unemployed, I will begin to work from the beginning of next month…
– Any chance to see some work from FluidDesigner merged back to Blender? Their Asset library, snapping and parametric objects are astonishing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DY_WvtbUHl0
I’m making furniture visualizations and all this new features are most important for me.
– Our project will need help all the time, and you can join any time too.
– It’s on the list to check!
Hey Ton:
Gooseberry is looking great. But what’s the plot? Because I know nobody wants another Tears of Steel. (No offense) And how about the name of the movie? Thanks!
Haha – we will know when it’s done :)
As far as I know, this is the plot: A salesman comes up to a sheep, and wants to sell him something that will allow him to go to a new adventure like every five minutes. He is a persuasive salesman, so the sheep buys it. Then, the sheep goes on all these adventures, but soon he wishes he was home instead of in these crazy worlds. Then, he falls in love with a girl sheep who has also bought the same thing from the salesman, and he sees her in some form in each world he goes to. (they change form to match their world, too) So she wants to go home too. But they both keep getting transported to these new worlds every five minutes, and they want to get out. That’s as much as I know, and it’s a pretty terrible summary, but there you have it.
We’ve seen the Unreal Engine 3 ported to HTML5 + javascript in only 4 days. At the same time, options for publishing interactive Blender files on the web and web based OS’s (the exploding ChromeOS, FirefoxOS) are very limited (yes, I’m looking at you Burster). Any chance of seeing the Blenderplayer ported to HTML5+JS so we can easily get Blender games / interactive files cross platform and on web?
Hi, Ton Do you know f a really good training course (or Website) full of really good tutorials on Animation,Architecture and Compositing?
Thanks!
If you want to dig deeper into architectural visualisation, the architecture academy by Andrew Price might be a very good starting point. It will re-open on the 14th of May. However, it focuses on the Modelling, Shading, Rendering and compositing part. Animation is not a topic there, but everything else is covered in depth
Thanks!
We have CGCookie and BlenderGuru and CGmasters, and… blender.org!
i started following blender from 2010-present, it still amazes me how mature blender developed(importantly composing), my question is the any major developing towards to game development mostly on side of interactive story telling games .which can feature more animtion ,(my games list refere to heavy rain, beyond two souls, walking dead, wolf amung us)
I’m a big fan of games that mend the gap with film and storytelling.
Actually, it’s how Blender got the investor money in 2000, because of our story and vision that CG animation or games will all converge, and that tools are needed to support artists for it.
Games should be made by artists. Coders should support them by making tools. It’s too often still the other way around – where the artists work for the coders.
It’s already been mentioned the option of selling 3d prints of Michele. How about just making them available on Shapeways or even multiple services and allowing people to order themselves.
Obviously they’ll take their cut, but it could be another revenue stream. This also keeps it open ended so it’s up to the individual which materials they want, colour, size, material etc.
Who is Michele? You mean the sheep?
The purpose of our projects is to share everything as CC-BY (or CC-BY-SA), from start. I’d be happy to have a share of Shapeways printing it, but that would be Shapeway’s decision. I don’t like the idea of locking up our work by restricting others to reproduce or use it.
I’m plannig a little trip to Amsterdam in the near future, is it okay if i stop by the Blender Institute to say hi?
Hi Ton!,
I’m plannig a little trip to Amsterdam in the near future, is it okay if i stop by the Blender Institute to say hi and take a look at the work you guys do?
Yep, everyone who rings the doorbell always get a short tour!
if i had the moneys, i would move there to just stick around and make coffee/clean/support the devs.. sigh.. perhaps someday..
Hello Ton.
I am impressed with what you are trying to accomplish with the Project Gooseberry and really hope you meet the goals but do see that it’s not a certainty at this point. Do you have a plan ‘b’ in case the goals cannot be met? I would hate for the project to be cancelled.
Either way it goes, thank you for your work on make Blender the tool it is. I feel it still needs improvements in some places such as it’s UI but is in good hands to make it happen.
Yep there’s a solid plan B.
What is the plan B? Or is that confidential?
Ton,
First of all I apologize if this was already asked (I can’t show all comments at once for some reason, so I can’t search effectively). Anyway…I love this community, and although I’ve only been around it for a year, I feel a kinship with other users/developers/artists. So with that in mind I would love to contribute to the project. Is there, will there, be any way for people who are not necessarily part of the bigger studios to contribute? (I will try and join studios anyway when the time comes..but asking just in case). I know in a recent gooseberry blog post you mentioned in the past projects there were modelling sprints etc but I wasn’t around to experience that so I don’t know how that plays out. Can you elaborate if there will be ways to contribute to the Gooseberry project on a volunteer basis and how? (even if its some asset creation, some menial work that studios might need help with etc). Thank you! Keep up the amazing work.
We do open projects, and for Gooseberry we intend to go open all the way.
That means everyone can share and look at what we do.
To make this work well, we decided to make the cloud.blender.org service – which will both be used by the teams to make the film, as will be accessible for the people who support us. Here you will get more direct connection with the teams, and can be walking around in the studios almost as a virtual intern. :)
The innovative challenge (and brilliance ;) of this crowd funding is that we don’t give silly perks away (like posters, blurays, postcards or a dinner with the producer), but that we realize this film entirely openly – as if we’re giving a live performance for an audience. Maybe not everyone in the audience can contribute, maybe not everyone can get personal attention, but we for sure will use this creative community power – and won’t get great surprising contributions go unnoticed.
Thanks! I can’t wait to see how this plays out and be part of it.
Hello Ton,
As Clemens and so many others have said, I just want to thank you and all the developers for everything! I professionally evolved so, so much since I met Blender. Thank you guys so much for this amazing “all in one” free software!
Hi Ton,
i want to ask you if the blender team intend to implement the following very important and simple features:
– dimensions of selection, scale from one side and movable pivot, see attachment
thanks and i really like blender, i follow the site almost every day.
I am sure people see this… but did you post this elsewhere too? Sometimes good ideas have to be told many times before it works. Heck – even the best ideas take time to get adopted :P
yes i posted it on blendernation, but it is so complicated to reach the developers, so i hope, somebody think to implement this so usefull features. if you have seen this, i hope that you could bring this to discussion in the developer meetings.
You should send your suggestions to members of the User Interface team. Please check out the current proposals and targets on https://developer.blender.org/project/view/12/
Have any of the current devs worked on any commercial 3d packages, before, during, or after their work on Blender? If not – have you considered hiring such devs?
I think there might be some issues with non compete clauses making it difficult.
Also I am not sure what the BF can pay but my expectation is that it would be significantly less then one would make at as an engineer at a mayor software company.
Probably not when using just the dev fund, but maybe with Gooseberry that would be affordable?
That could be, if we had 4x more supporters! Go get them for us!
I’m on it.
Very often such developers have to sign NDAs, so it’s not easy for them to work on Free software.
Well, they wouldn’t have to disclose anything about the work they did for other employers.
The funny thing is that the reverse seems to work very well for people. Working on open source and then getting a job as a result of demonstrating skills.
I don’t know of any developer in our current team who worked on a commercial 3d tool.
Is the Gooseberry website hardcoded or is it wordpress/joomla/drupal or something?
Which one?
The blog and the campaign.
Blog is WP. The campaign runs on the Blender Cloud, a custom Flask-based application.
That’s cool! I am an amateur HTML coder and I love to see hardcoded advanced websites.
How do I support you guys exactly?
Support Project Gooseberry or donate (see blender.org)
Check out https://cloud.blender.org/gooseberry/
Would you consider doing another open game project based on Gooseberry? There has been some discussion of this on BA and I wanted to know your opinion.
I am very interested to find ways to support game team(s) to work along us. They get craploads of great content :)
But: why not do an open game – on a level as we did BBB or Sintel or ToS? That has a lot of reasons… all of it because I’m afraid it won’t work.
We can better do this discussion elsewhere – but my analysis is that making games (and I mean the real stuff, playable, top quality work like from Naughty Dog or Guerilla) is not only incredible hard, but also not feasible with Blender or open source. We are really far away from their technology, and we won’t be able to find the art talents, nor the coders.
Long time maya and houdini user , i switch from maya to blender for most of the general work , what miss me the more in blender is the lack of support of alembic . what are the plans for this ? i think it s something realy important (at least for me ,to import my houdini stuff into blender)
Focus for gooseberry would be on this – animation+physics support.
Lukas Tönne is already working on Alembic on and off. Support Goosberry and that will be another of the many improvements :)
Hi Ton, I have been using blender since 2007. I am very grateful of this software, and the community around it. I use it constantly. It largely influenced my decision to get my degree in Computer Science, and thus changed my life.
My questions:
-Perhaps I’m just ignorant, but I can’t find anything that you created using Blender. Do you just program, or do you do some modeling in Blender from time to time too? I think it would be cool to have 3D printed whatever made by Ton! If you were to share a .blend made by you I would subscribe to Blender Cloud right now!
-How come we never see any programming tutorials from you the master of the source code himself? Even for a proficient programmer it can be hard to jump in to the Blender source or even the python interface. I remember making a extension to the threejs plugin that would ssh your files to a server after export and had a really hard time finding the right information for things like advanced manipulation of the GUI.
-Right now I’m not as interested in the Blender Cloud because I fear it wouldn’t be too interesting until later on in the development of the movie. I want to show my support, but I don’t want to jump the gun on Blender Cloud until the really interesting stuff starts getting underway. Could there be a way to pay now so that my support is accounted for, but have my subscription activate in a few months?
My thoughts exactly on the Blender Cloud.
– I did a lot of graphics and animation in 90ies. Try to find “did it done it, Neogeo”.
– You can find plenty of blend files from me, like here: http://download.blender.org/demo/test/test249.zip
– If you check the wiki tech docs, a lot is from my hand. Check the 2.5 recode – nearly all by me.
(Coding tutorials? Hardly anyone makes it :)
– Just make the pledge and pay in 2 months. We won’t make it hard for our supporters to help :P
Okay so now I do see the pledge which would have satisfied my last question. However, I went ahead and bought a auto-renew subscription. I didn’t know that it would only be $12 a month after the initial payment for 3 months. Which is only a little more than Netflix so I figured “what the hell”. I plan on staying for at least the 18 months too. I really hope Blender can make this happen. It would be really cool to see my name in the credits at the movie theater, or at least on a movie online. However, I would still like to know a good place to start with coding in Blender. I really wanna to contribute to the Blender source code in even a small way. “Hardly anyone makes it”? I always thought there was a ton of developers.
We have some Python scripting tutorials here at BlenderDiplom.com: http://blenderdiplom.com/en/tutorials/scripting.html – there are still many addons that need fixes and improvements. Or old Addons that need to ported to the latest version of Blender. Start hacking in Python!
:) Did it Done it from NeoGeo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKAQNBaZ_I8
I have a lot of interest from colleges and schools to get their students involved in Gooseberry, have them peek around in our production and produce parts. Yes – they’ll get cloud accounts!
Some schools will also pay very well for it. One person told me how his department just spent 20,000 dollar on a couple of licenses last month. For them the cloud contribution would be peanuts.
That’s great to hear (read^^)!
But as also stated by Martijn Berger (somewhere among all these comments), it is common, that many talented (young) people starting with Blender, demonstrating their skills and then get hired for big studios – away from Blender (as they get payed for working with Maya, 3ds max, C4D, etc…).
Maybe that would be just an idea for a future project; I just suggest, that the other way around could boost Blender regarding both development and it’s place in the industry. The idea is not to raise a fund for a movie to spread Blender, but to collaborate with colleges or so, to build a “Blender Filmmaker Students Cup”, where they make their productions with Blender and that movies could then even run for international film awards. Would be also great references for Blender and could get more artists not only into 3D but specifically into using Blender.
Dear Mr. Roosendaal,
is there any future plans to develop hair rigs (like in “Tangled” or Frozen”), so that characters’ designs for hair control is not entirely dictated by hair dynamics?
Thank you :]
We envy their tools… and that’s why we do gooseberry :)
im also have a lot of appreciation, but i like to know if blender foundation doesn’t get the 500.000 euros, they will do another foundin with more time or they will a movie shorter than ir was planned?
P.D: also think if the project is a long run project like it is i think it will be better take a little time for the founding
I think we should discuss this after the 19th :)
Wouldn’t it be nice for supporters of the gooseberry project get some sort of badge so we can brag about pledging or subscribing to BlendercCloud in our forum signatures and so on? :D
Yeah, that would be great!
Yep. In fact, your registration on cloud.blender.org is what we call “BlenderID” – and that will be used everywhere in blender.org in the future. Also for features like .blend security or signing.
That’s cool. Decent layer managing is already on the list since like eh 2004. Keep advertising it? My mind is getting overflown a bit already :)
Alright, I’ll mention it from time to time then : )
Ton, would you take russian citizenship? Russian passport – it is new trend. It will be cool.
Sure, send me one!
Hi Ton, I think this a very fascinating activity for us.. the opportunity to calm our doubts :)
– What we need to work in the Blender Foundation?
– I work in a game dev studio right now… is there a real plan to dev for smartphones with blender game engine?
– What you think about Godot Engine (MIT licence) ? http://www.godotengine.org/
is there an oportunity to help them improve it from the Blender Fundation with a project? (like when you use Krita in Tears of Steal and now they have a good atention and feedback).
– Finally… You will do this again ?, when? (to be prepare :’) )
I use blender for over 8-9 years now… and I really love all the effort that you put in it.
Greetings and cheers for Blender
Hey ErikCastillo, the Blender game engine is sort of being “phased out”. It will be turned into a “interactive mode” instead of a game engine. With so many other great game engines, it is not really worth their time. The Godot Engine is very neat, though. I remember the day when it became open-source, and I was pretty excited. Of course, I’m still an avid Unity 3D user, but if you want to use an open source game engine, I think Godot is the way to go.
Too many questions! Answer to the first: nobody works for Blender Foundation. I volunteer.
My paid job is for Blender Institute. (Yes, no donation moneys go to me, I am a proud entrepreneur).
Hello I’m an old Blender user and I just want to thank you for this amazing software. I’m currently learning in a Multimedia School in Paris and last week I’ve presented a conference about Blender, I get many nice comments about it. I hope Blender will be used more in schools. Anyway thank you again for all the things you give to us.
Hello Ton, I tried to ask this before but for some reason it didn’t work, so I’ll try again. Anyway, do you know what the status is on the Blender feature videos? I heard that Jonathan Williamson and Andrew Price were working on them quite a while ago, but I haven’t heard anything since.
My hope is to still do them, but other projects have had to take precedence (like Gooseberry). There simply hasn’t been enough time to do them yet.
Yeah we need them! Check ‘get involved’ on blender.org, there’s a link to the mailing list for webcontent.
Don’t you think it would be possible to have a consistent art style when working remotely with different studios? I work as a game artist, and it’s quite common with smaller productions, and bigger productions that use outsourcing. All you need is an art director who will guide the production and decide on a couple of props, characters and environments to serve as a reference during the whole project, reject assets when they fail to meet the criteria, and help with feedback on how to make them consistent with the rest.
I have never seen that work – unless you have a big budget, a lot of time, and well trained people.
Even worse – when we worked on Sintel we could exactly see who animated sintel – each animator has a signature. Same for light, compositing etc. To get this really uniform takes a lot of experience and time.
No it just takes an art director and something called style sheets. You are saying that no large open source animation film has been done before, yet in the same line that since you think consistency hasnt been done before with that budget its not possible. Seems a bit of a contradiction. IF you are willing to take risks with one, show the world it can be done, or as you put it, a grand experiment, why not try to go for the challenge of consistency in art style. If one cant mimic the pipeline used throughout the industry, then a lot of what you can learn is lost.
Hello Ton,
Will you be developing the video sequence editor more during project gooseberry? Specifically, will you make it more integrated with the compositor? The current video sequence editor seems quite outdated and isn’t very well integrated with the rest of blender, especially the “effect strips”. I feel that it would make more sense to use the compositor to do colour correction and grading rather than having the whole separate effects strips.
Thank you for all you do.
Sequencer is big need of a lot of coding love.
However, I prefer to keep sequencer to be designed to 100% interactive and realtime. Drop in a shot and play. Do realtime effects (grading) and keep it work.
Hi Ton,
Like so many people I’d like to say thanks for this great tool you guys are sharing with the world. I’ve never seen a project so focused and alive as blender. I Will definitely be supporting gooseberry. It’s going to be awesome.
.
Just a couple of quick questions…
.
1, Does it ever strike you as funny that after starting as an tool created to help a company make video productions, that Blender’s now come full circle and now productions are being created to help develop blender ?
.
2, Are there any plans to unify the different selection modes ? There’s multiple selection tools and they all seem to behave differently. Is there any chance we’ll ever be able to choose any selection tool as the default persistent selection method and have them all use the same hotkeys/modifiers the same way ? For example, using paint select and being able to keep working without reverting to the standard single select mode. Using Box select persistently rather than pressing b every time I want to use it. Knowing that there’s a standard applied to all the selection modifier hotkeys, (Exact keys aren’t important to me but for example, shift adds to selection, ctrl or alt removes, no modifier starts new selection. In all selection modes)
.
3. The Blender books, I haven’t seen any ebook versions of them. Is something like this planned ?
.
And Thanks again for running such a great project.
how many programmers are voluntary and how many are contrated, company donates some money for their operating costs?
There are about 10 paid developers now (By Blender or other companies). And 80 unpaid ones.
Is it over now? 11:00 A.M MST here.
Follow up, that was fun.
Yep I’m done. I did all of them :)
Thanks everyone, it’s been a pleasure!
How was the Mattew Passion?
Very good! The conductor kept it very natural – quiet.
Would Blender.org help support indie projects made with blender (by giving publicity on the website) if they’re good enough?
If they’re open source, open content, contribute to development?
The counter is at 2199 now. Help us and make it 2200!
http://cloud.blender.org/gooseberry/
Showing 2,200 supporters to me. :)
Done, thanks! (Keep it coming :)
I would like to ask about how to make objects appear in random locations I want it to be placed randomly within preset boundary’s. IE: place the object somewhere between 1 and -1 on the X and Y, and set the Z to 0 ?
Select what you want to randomise -> Space_bar -> “randomize transform” -> F6 to fine tune
Is that what you’re looking for?
What I want to do is when I use the Add Object function, I don’t want the object added in the same place every time, I want it to be placed randomly within preset boundary’s. IE: place the object somewhere between 1 and -1 on the X and Y, and set the Z to 0
i want to make like a balloon game where the user can touch the balloons and make it disappear and re appear in a random place and so on
I can only think of writing a python script as a solution to that, sorry.
BGE is a little beyond me.
i am new to python unfortunately i will keep searching
Hi Ton,
I’ve written an article about what is missing from Blender’s particle system:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?326765-Blender-s-Particle-System-Is-Terrible
You don’t have to read it, but right now the particle system is missing some critical features such as per particle animation and settings such as “particles per step”. My biggest concern for future versions of Blender is updating the particle system with these desperately needed features, something that could be accomplished with the “particle nodes” project.
Will we be seeing such progress with the particle system soon?
http://amrkamel.tumblr.com/post/82405089519/top-10-highlights-of-todays-q-a-with-ton-roosendaal
Share this recap of today’s Q&A to those who missed it.
http://amrkamel.tumblr.com/post/82405089519/top-10-highlights-of-todays-q-a-with-ton-roosendaal
I know blender since 2.4 and today 2.7. Congratulations all the updates of tools. now inswer, why the tool “text” not updated? I’m work with publicity and need this tool. And have fails in the text. Why this tool not suffered updated? I wait your aswer for email. thank you. [email protected]
Hi Ton,
About Audio, Have plan for improve audio edit in blender?
Effects like: reverb, way way, distortion
(Both to VSE and BGE)
Project Gooseberry will worked this too or this is not a focus in moment???
Thanks
Thank you, Ton.
Mr.Ton Roosendaal. I would like to ask developers at blender institution to create their own Win-graphic OS,where future blender and open-source programs operate in a more efficient clean environment instead of a Linux and Microsoft polluted environment. I think is GREAT!!! I hate having unnecessary and unrelated programs to blender use and experiencing corrupt registries.
Dear mr Ton.
As ou are the main gear of this amazing growing machine, what ll happen if you die ?
I m sure the software ll be haunted by your ghost , but is there anyone like u to keep it so alive ?
Pie menus were a pre 2.7 goal, and it kept getting pushed back with very little word on where it was development wise. The addon is was spurred the push to make it officially part of Blender. Its no longer developed and there are some issues with it and non standard blender keymaps.
Hi, Ton, it’s a great pleasure to talk to you. Best wishes to Blender and Project Gooseberry! Blender is great gift tool ever evolving. Thanks for the free spirit. Still, when I come across some Nurbs related softwares such as MoI3d which claims to be made for designers and artists, i often wonder when Blender will better equipped with these tools someday. I truely believe that one day Blender will have it and that would be SUPER Blender. After all, what i want to say is , we love Blender!
Hi Ton,
I wanna thank you for Blender3D – it is probably best software on this planet with great user interface, pls don’t change it for make it for dumbs or I’ll have to use last version with actual UI :) I thank also for related work from you and developers.)
Have a nice day.
Milan Rys
mejla.cz
Hello, I’m late :-)
We talked a lot, improving the user interface of Blender.
Andrew Price had made interesting proposals.
Will there be changes further on the UI ?
Thank you