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Blender Community Rescues Sources
Christoffer Green writes "Today the Blender funding campaign went through the 100k limit,
sufficient now to pay for the ransom fee needed to make Blender Open
Sourced. The Blender Foundation aims to have the deal signed before
October 1, do a pre-release for donating members only at October 5,
organize a Blender Conference in Amsterdam October 11-12-13, and make
the official CVS release on October 13 for everyone.
This doesn't mean that you should stop donating though. The foundation
still depends on your contributions to cover costs that have been made."
So, blender is what? I gather its some product that we're buying from its stockholders. I've got to say, its a really neat idea, buying off a broduct to make it open source.
Mod point free since 2001
It is the investors that wanted the sources to be opensourced for 100k.
The source has not been sold. It has been made opensourced.
That buffer may not exist. The "Pending" were people that said they were going to pay, but were supposedly waiting on their Pay Pal account to go through. Ton is cancelling all pending transactions that are more than 4 weeks old. I wouldn't be surprised if that $8000 turned out to be more like $1000.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Just thought I'd mention that due to a generous money donation by a private sponsor, the LinuxTrade software was converted to the GPL on 08/30/02.
This is a great trend, IMHO.
If you interested in what Blender can do (as I was), check out the galleries.
:)
I was pleasantly surprised. I'm sure you will be too.
Actually, just seeing the galleries makes me what to donate some money.
Blenders back end is amazing, but the interface is based upon enabling a slow and inefficient style of modelling that is no longer usable for comercial production.
,x/y/z/xy/yz/xz separation of input, etc would be good too. This and the ability to save and easily modify these active planes (for input) would make blender much more powerful and allow work to be done in a single perspectival window (maybe with small orthographic views for newbies who don't dream in wireframe and can't see it in perspective)
... I need pictures. Code the point/control point location as an equation taking things like remaining tangential to this point, and maintaining a right angle between these two sections and remaining within a certain part of the length of this line in a way that is dynamically updatable. Do that and make it stable and easy to learn and the modelling world will stop and praise you!
It has many things that commercial packages do not have. What it lacks is predominantly in the interface. Yes I have used it, and much more advanced (and expensive) packages.
It needs to move away from the three orthographic views for modelling, one perspectival view for visualisation mode of design, where people use ten moves in three windows to achieve what should have happened in one move with ABSOLUTE ACCURACY using object snaps. The people who do this in front of me, then tell me that they are saving time. They continue to say this when they are in living hell later on when they need to use boolean operations or anything advanced with their mess of a model. I would find it funny, were it not for the human tragedy (DON'T THINK THAT'S A JOKE)
In order to move away from this interface mode, Blender will need to separate the viewport from the active plane (the co-ordinate system being used for input and editing of objects) and implement GOOD snapping for endpoints, midpoints and center points as an ABSOLUTE MINIMUM. snap to face
The other enhancement NEEDED is an improved HEIRACHICAL layer structure. The present collection of little buttons that pass for a layer structure are humerous if you don't actually try to use them. A layer structure with grouping, toggleable visability, snapability, selectability and lock status is part of modelling. If this could be used to facilitate object selection, apply heirachic object propeties according to group membership, and be extended to transparently allow for the division of the project into blocks (separate files, I think this is practically done) that could be used simultaneously by a range of designers on different tasks, then Blender would be up there with some of the best editors in existence. (Moving the configuration stuff into dialogs and/or running it vertically would help the interface a lot too. The basic layout of the buttons is very pixel hungry)
These things are not big additions compared to the amazing stuff already in there, but I haven't seen and no doubt wouldn't understand the code involved. I know nothing about it's language and the developers have been too defensive about their interface to be worth approaching.
To be the worst nightmare of EVERY commercial 3D/4D modelling/rendering program around, here are some non interface related suggestions:
It should improve the granularity of it's sub-object editing. Selection, deletion and insertion of points, lines, curves, faces, subfaces, control points etc, and their simultaneous selection at a range of levels (select different points, lines, faces and objects and move them with a single operation.:-) This will bring blender up to spec with some of the most efficient and intuitive modelling tools around.
To take a leaf from some of the work in development at microstation (I am not from microstation. Sorry microstation, you should have continued your support for Linux) They are working on some seriously cool new tools that TOTALLY BLEW MY MIND. I would leave unix forever for this.
Ready, They are working on something like a GUI integrated development environment for the back end scripting of models as part of the standard modelling tools, so that you can use a GUI to tell a point to remain at the
Anyway that's probably long enough.
No warranty of any kind is offered as to the quality of this post.
Support will start at $5K/year. For that, you will get dedicated 24/7 service from a set of the developers, accessed via a single number. you will have to run ardour on a system we build for you; if you run it on your own system, support will cost more. if this bothers you, consider that protools for windows is certified for only a single intel-based system, built and sold by IBM. run it on any other system, and there is NO support available.
let me know when you want to sign the contract. i suggest you at least wait till version 1.0 comes out, but don't let that stop you.