Blender, Coming of Age
CC Attribution 2.0 Belgium:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
Roosendaal, Ton
The presentation is going to be audiovisual and entertaining; based on a number of short videos I want to tell the story of Blender. Starting in late 90s, how Blender became open source, going over the big milestones for Blender, end ending with the fast growth of our project and the interest of the film and game industry. Blender now is a more mature project now, which involves a different dynamics than it used to be. How are we going to tackle the challenges of the industry, while not losing the community that brought us this far?
 Can people hear me? Yes? Okay. So the technology is not perfect here. I have a presentation prepared with lots of videos and videos also come with sound. So you have to imagine the fantastic sound tracks and the sounds that you are hearing. Maybe I'll talk a little bit through the films. We'll see how it grows, I'll improvise a little bit. So I wanted to start showing before I will say anything. A little clip with a fantastic sound track, with music. I don't know how that is done. Here, you can press it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, now it's down. That was too late. You can. Okay, well, this was my talk in one minute. So what I'm going to talk about is the story of Gleender, how Gleender became of age. Gleender is actually a very, very old project that started in 1994. I hired a small studio in Eindhoven in the south of the Netherlands. And in that studio, we were making computer graphics and animation, video graphics, we called it mostly. And we did some 3D as well. And I started to redesign our in-house software, which we were using for rendering and some modeling. And I thought, let's call it Gleender. And this picture, what you see here is the oldest backup I could with Twix. So you can see Blender.C and Blender.H. It has January 294 as a date stamp. That's the official birthday of Gleender. So in the studio of our company, we made mostly models of buildings or product presentations. And all the things that were not really doing film or animation with characters. What you see here is a reel, what we did in the 92 to 96 period. And everything you see has been made with Gleender or with our own software, what we hired at that time. So 25 years old Rock for clients like who wanted to have video business or videotapes. Because in the 90s, every self-respecting business had a video, right? And then you had a clown coming in and you put a video under the corner and you showed them the corporate video. You can imagine this is in the same period as Toy Story 1 was being made and released in 95. Of course we were looking up to this Hollywood because they had much bigger computers and much bigger, better software than we had. But in the end, what you see here is all made with software that runs on 2, 4 megabyte computers. And in the end, we had 8 megabytes to do things in. And that was a limit of the complexity that we could achieve in 3D. At the final years of the company, I was the founder and the owner of Nio Nio, you could see that the video business would go down. People didn't want to have corporate videos anymore, but instead the internet was coming up and of course games were coming up. And I decided to add game creation tools in the Blender environment so that people could create a complete game in the tool and then export it to, for example, the PlayStation. So we had an official developer kit and what you see there is just a game prototype that you could make and play in Blender on the Silicon Graphic system. And then export it into one little Blender file which you could load on the PlayStation and then play the game. We tried to do business with that, but nobody believed in it and everybody said, yeah, cool technology, but what's the game? What's the game? This is the game demo, this is not a real playable game. So I decided to sell the company's goodwill and clients to another business and I took the software to a startup center in the University of Eindhoven, but I thought Blender was much cooler than the business I had making video graphics or games. So I founded the company, not a number. And with not a number, it was a one-man company. You could see the room there as I was sitting. That was all we had. The first thing I did was writing a manual and selling it to get some money in. And the business idea was to give away the software for free, but not as open source. But the software was released for everyone for free. Then very quickly, we did the freeBSD port first. We did Linux port. We got help to get the Windows port working. We did the Siki, which was a little extension that you could extra features in Blender. And we went to a share graph to show what we are doing. And at that time, maybe all the people that I will remember, that was the days of the Internet bubble. And in 2000, I couldn't resist. I was still a one-man company with an intern. That was all. And then people were coming to me and said, Your business is worth 10 million. Can we buy 40% of the shares for a 4.5 million investment? Well, why not, right? So let's try this. So in 2000, I suddenly had a company with more than 40 employees in three, four months, from one to 40, trying to do something and conquer the market with the concept of having freeware software and commercial services around this. Well, as you know, how it went in those days, it was burning money. It was burning money. I created shareholder value. All the games that Silicon Valley is also playing is what we tried to do. And this didn't end well. The company shut down, it got bankrupt, it restarted for a little while. And then in 2002, the investors told me, Tom, Blender is now going here in the drawer. We will lock it and it's now ours. You go do something else with your life. I'm not going to do something else with my life, right? I want to continue with this Blender project. So I set up a foundation, the Don't Profit Blender Foundation, and I could get a couple of the Blender websites back because they were under my name and not in the investor's hand. And I launched a plan to buy back the rights of the software to make it open source. The original rights were still of the investors at that time, but they would agree on making Blender free software, Hanoot CPL, if we would collect via the community 100,000 euros. After some negotiation, the investors agreed because nobody would ever pay more for the software than we could. To my shock and surprise, we made it in seven weeks. We did this all based on principles that were called at that time, not crowdfunding, but it was called the street performer protocol. And this is the basis of what Kickstarter and Indiegogo started on later, because we already used pledges, like if you say, well, if you make a target of 100k, then you have to pay. And we had multiple levels, people could step in with extras. It was a traditional crowdfunding. There's a great article from the scientist about our historical crowdfront raiser, Freak Success or First of a Tramp, but in a way, a Blender was a freak success because it never happened again. I've been contacted a lot by companies who went bankrupt, and then the user said, hey, you want to buy back the code, how did you do this, how can we do this? And it never happened, and to my knowledge, it was never a community who could buy back the software. And actually the main reason is because I'm too stubborn to accept other people's code. When I made Blender, there was nothing external, there was no module, there was nothing normal engineering practices of making software. I wrote everything myself. So the IP of Blender was fully owned by the company. If you go to other programs like Lightwave, or you had the SoftyMash, and other 3D programs that stopped, the community would love to buy it back, but the companies don't own the products that they were using in closed modules and closed libraries. So they assembled the software, which they had the right to sell, but they don't own it. Anyway, we had a first Blender conference, and we released Blender as a source in 2002 with the help of the Free Software Foundation Europe, Loic, I don't know if Loic is anywhere, but thanks to the Free Software Foundation for the support, it was a big step to convert a closed source development environment to a public system. Then in the period after that, I had to set up an open source project, which was new for me. I knew of course how open source works, what the principles are, but how do you manage projects online, how do you work with communities, how do you make decisions, what do people really like. One of the things that helped really well was me really stepping back a bit. I focused on the business, making sure that there was another book published saying so I could work on Blender full time, but I let decisions and management and this progress on Blender development, I left it to the community. For example, there was a two-hopal tree, if they are Finnish people here, they are now why it's called two-hopal, it's an evil tree, there was a fork of Blender where everybody had access to, everybody. If you wanted to have an idea, just put it in the software. And every three months it was so unstable that we could replace it with another version, but it works fantastic because there's a threshold for people to come on board. The other thing that the community showed, which was so strong, is they really work on the things that matter for them. And I'm the person from the corporate background a little bit with the freezer, and I go, oh wow, I want to make games and I want to have a tool where you have interaction and linear content creation all together in one. It's still a great idea, but maybe 20 years later now it's getting a little bit more feasible to do that. So instead, developer said, great idea Tom, but why don't we first fix the modeler? Why don't we first fix the material system and get better texture and better sampling and Blender? So they really focus on the things that matter and that matter for the users. And that kind of open source dynamics is what I really appreciated and learned from. That was in the first few years, we did a Blender 2.3 release with Hatterpick improvement on the UI already, it became a little bit more usable. So then in 2005, I was ending up with an open source project. And even though I love to work with people on this dynamic of the community, I also noticed that there was something missing and the typical open source projects tend to become very technical and a little bit anti-user oriented. Developers like to develop and like to have fun and users are sometimes kept separately. And from my background, I was complaining there was in-house software, I was always used to have the software to use it and developers working together on things. And specifically for Blender, because it's a 3D tool, it is essential that you do this. You have to get the creatives to influence how that happens with the technology and how to make it usable. So that's why I thought, let's start a project, Project Orange, where we invite the best 5, 6 creatives from the Blender community to Amsterdam and let them make a compelling, interesting, great animation from and inspire that way the community of developers online to catch up with development for them, to have this day-to-day interaction. That became the elephant's dream of the world's first open movie with a fantastic soundtrack. So we were so proud when we made this. If you look back to it now, the animation is a bit clunky and it looks a bit weird and stuff. But don't forget, this was so amazing that we could get from the previous reel, which was mostly cameras going around in 3D models, we suddenly had animated characters with voices, we were acting, and we're telling an interesting, weird story. So for us, the elephant's dream is a milestone, and not only because of the process of working with the developers while we're making the film, but also because we released it at Creative Commons. And we didn't release the film only at Creative Commons, we released everything. From the storyboards, to the textures, to the scripts, to the test versions, to the deleted scenes, to the whole production database of the studio was released. And we could fund that by selling that on a dual box DVD box where the film was on, but also you could put it in your computer, and it had all the blender files and the software, so you could get every shot, load it, render it yourself and change it. And that model worked fantastic to share content and to share the technology at the same time. So I thought, it's time to do something more permanent. I want to have a studio again, and I want to have a place where you can put developers and artists together on projects to push the blender further. So I found this little place in the docklands of Amsterdam, the old warehouse. There was a bankrupt company, they still had all this crap going there. I could rent it quite cheap, and to say, well, this is where we're going to work and make movies and work on blender projects with our main business model DVDs. We could put Datown DVDs, which is open source data, but you just sell the distribution, and do crowdfunding for more films. For example, BigBug Bunny. That was the first film we did in the Blender Institute, and now production level really kicked in. BigBug Bunny, I think people have seen BigBug Bunny, right? Did you see BigBug Bunny? I think of all our open movies, BigBug Bunny has the most views and hits on YouTube of all the films we ever did, and that goes into the hundreds of millions. Because it's a creative commons, people pick it up, put it on their own channel, slap advertisement on it, and get 10 or 20 million hits. It's fine, right? Go ahead, do it. Here's a little clip. As you can see, character animation quality and rendering quality improved a lot. The expression of characters was fantastic. Better deformation, especially hair, hair systems. Furry animals was completely hot and big in those days. All the animation studios were doing furry animals, and we want to do furry animals in Blender as well. It's horrible. We were accused in those days of promoting violence, right? As somebody called the genre of our movies, open source violence, right? This is cartoon, right? In cartoon movies you have to do things to make people laugh. This was a big success for us. We're moving on. Blender Institute was doing well, and the software development projects are getting bigger. I could hire a couple of people because of our DVD sales and training, what we did. So I thought, okay, it's time for the big leap. People who work in open source communities have all confirmed to you that doing a big leap is a dance of a sting. Usually it doesn't work, and the communities like to have smaller targets. Let's do something and then release it next week. Everybody will say, yeah, that's awesome. We can do something and release it maybe next month. But let's do something and then we work on it for three years, maybe five. Then people will say, why would I do that? It's not really inspiring to have this kind of big target. On the other hand, for Blender it was essential to do a couple of things to upgrade the UI and to have more modern interaction in the software. That is called the non-modal parallel workflow. For example, this is how Blender 2.5 looked like. The software became not only visible more modern, it was also a pleasure to work with because everything kept working. For example, you have your menu popping up. It still could do the preview renders in the back, which was threaded, and it could update the viewports. So everything was done and developed in a way that it always would keep working. Whatever you do, even when you type a text in a button, everything in the UI stays responsive. That makes working with the software much more pleasure. This is standard, many software nowadays have a Blender needed as well. Meanwhile, we had Sintel coming. Sintel was at that time the biggest ambitious project we did, and we ended up with a fantastic story with a real script writer, with a young director who is a genius, he's fantastic. So we spent much attention to the story development, and it really became the darling of open source films, especially when the film was taken down a couple of years ago by Sony, accidentally because they had some music club going on, like they won't have it for this version. But Sony took it down, it was for four or five days, the talk of the internet, and suddenly we found out that people really, really appreciated this film. Of course it had lots of views online, but it was considered to be part of our free culture. It is a free culture movie because it's open source, done with open source, and we share everything as we usually do, and people close their hearts. And it looked fantastic. It was such a nice film where we show that with open source software, and with the community, it's how it was out. Normal people, great artists, but just people like you and me, can make a film like that. Come on, come on. Okay, move along. At that time, what I would like to note, in 2011, we started the Blemmer Network because there was suddenly more interest for professionals to use Blemmer, and the Blemmer Network was a website where people could connect and also offer services. Everybody who's using software always says, especially for open source, that it's nice, it's free, but where can I get the support? Where can I have somebody to explain to me how it works? Or where can I get help when I have a book and want to have it fixed? How can I get a new feature in Blemmer or can somebody make me a script? All of that is what people can get access to via the network. Because the Blemmer Organization is way too small to do all this support, and we have a worldwide community, they should do all that business. Then I can focus on making movies and working on the software. Another big milestone in 2011 was our render engine cycles. This is the senior Blemmer developer, Brecht van Lommel, he took a break and after half a year he came back and said, how, look at what we have here. And that was cycles. And cycles are a way to do a physically based rendering, high quality rendering using surface definitions, as they have to call it, that are actually representations of how light scatters on surfaces. It's a formula for light distribution between surfaces. So you can use that for ray tracing to create photorealistic effects. And suddenly technology was far enough thanks to CPUs and multi-threading and CPUs, that you could also have ray tracing, and this high quality rendering to be part of a 3D program and have it in the viewport, that was real time almost. So that's what we combined with another film, that is the Thesa Steel. Not only we use cycles for photorealistic rendering, what you need for visible effects film, that is what motion tracking, that means that you can track somebody's moves, that you can have an eye and then put a motor on it or something. That camera reconstruction is important because you want to have, based on footage, you want to know where is the suitable camera, so I can act like monsters in a team to walk around. Masking, compositing, all things you need to do for photorealistic effects. So this was a sci-fi film playing in Amsterdam, where the last of mankind has been locking themselves up in an old shirt, getting attacked by an evil robot who was taking over the world, and fighting with a lost bitch of hope. So that's what we did. Was it online? Was it online? Now at that time we're going to 2013, and I thought let's have a feature film project, but there were now small studios around the world using render, from America to Australia, all the way. And let's see if we can create some kind of network and make a relay movie, where everybody makes a path and then production moves to the next studio. That was at Gooseberry. The funding target was also extreme. We needed a lot of people to support this to be able to do this. And we did a two month campaign and we didn't make it. It was not enough interest and motivation in the community to do something at this scale. So that didn't work, but what did work were two other milestones. One was we started for this initiative to blend the cloud. But instead of having data on plastic and do business with that, people want to have it online and accessible. So why would you want to have all your open source creative commerce data on a piece of plastic that's useless? We have a website with gigabytes of data, the whole history of the blended studios, and people could get access to that for $10 per month. Not only they would get access to the old films, but we would use that subscription model to fund the next films as well. That's how we did Cosmos Lundromat 2015, which was another level up in quality for rendering and with the style and with the direction and everything. This really got us the industry, including people from Ireland, when they needed to look at what we were doing. I could almost do the dialogue myself. Cosmos Lundromat is of course online. We should watch it. We are currently investigating Cosmos Lundromat 2, the second part where this can become an open source series. A LACATV series was done with offshore software, and I think it's coming soon. And in this scene, the guy with orange hair tries to convince the sheep that he is so much more than a sheep. You can get a much better line for it. You can have a little device on a neck and etc. You should watch it. It's beautiful. This little reel is something that started popular online in the Benner community. This is a breakdown, we call it. It shows how it works in the studio to use 3D software to make parts of the movies. You see experiments and tests. One of the highlights of Cosmos Lundromat is a big colorful tornado that comes down, picks up the sheep and sucks it into an alternative dimension. You can see a lot of attempts. Another thing that went to simulation technology, it's very popular on universities to have long students working on open source libraries for fluid simulation, for smoke simulation, for hair simulation, for grass, for wind. Everything that's part of that phenomenon is part of a good 3D environment. Another film we did in 2015 was a comedy film, where we shot a camera cutting into some kind of fight with a penguin. You want to see how it ends? You can go alone. And as if it was nothing, we thought, I thought especially, I want to have that feature from anyway, so we are going to do it in a different way. Instead of working with a lot of small studios around the world, let's try to get something built in our own place in Amsterdam, expand the business with a film studio to make an open source pipeline for production. A complete 100% free open source pipeline for making animation film, based on Blender, of course, and with other tools. I got the rights of a famous Dutch comic series, it's also quite well known in Belgium and Germany. This is Agent 327, a Dutch spy who's not an 007, so he has no license to kill, he has no budget. He's in Holland, but there are lots of international conspiracies of people who come to Amsterdam to get stuff done. So it's adventurous and comedy, target audience a little bit more than youth, because we really like to explore making animation film for the more avid audience. Yes, a good place. Agent 327. Agent 327. Now, this project, this was fantastic. It turned lots of heads, it looks fantastic, it looks like a commercial feature film, and I was busy and ready to go around the world and sell it, to get funding for it, but something else happened, and that, of course, was planned at 2.8. There was another big leap scheduled already since 2014, is to grab Blender to another level, to really look at industry compatibility, and to make it easier to configure it workflow as a main theme, and having real-time photo realistic work in the viewport. And so that you work on things, just like if you have a modern game engine, that are looking almost photo realistic, you should be able to work, create things in an environment as if it looks real, and that's what modern 3D software does. And another innovation that made Blender important for a lot of studios, is the Green Spencil, you will see a little demo of that later, where you can draw in 3D. Not first when people thought of what, why would I draw in 3D? Well, it's serious, it's what storyboard is like, but also fashion designers, card designers, character, and grip-suit designers, but if you can draw it very well, and you can use 3D lines in your environment, you can do crazy things. All of this project for 2.8, it went way, way too slow, it was driving on and on and on, and I thought maybe it's better to drop this feature film for a little while and focus on organizing 2.8 better. So we did another interesting campaign, we had a little rocket token, with a USB drive, which had some things on it, and we sold 3,200 rockets for 14 euros each, in like, within two weeks. And that gave us some sponsors from the corporate sponsors from the market, gave us money to get all the core developers from Blender for three months to come to Amsterdam to get this whole 2.8 project working. And we got room for a bigger studio in Amsterdam. And this is me going around showing the place. Local souvenir, fridge, market, and big house. The classroom, we come with the weekly room, we come up with some painting, and then we have the best place, my room of course. We have a rabbi, what was it, a grabber wood. This is a kitchen, you can really make use of. This was the basic of all the content. It was all tools, band, craft, I used the glass trisors. This is where we long mass-tipped. Blender 2.8, part of our gallery. But it doesn't like to be the most important role. Our showroom! The Akmurers 15 castles. And at the end, the 8 of them. The castles. The castles square, the cool print house. If you are in Amsterdam, you want to drop by, let us know. We always like to have short tours, 5 minutes maybe. But it's a fun place to see. As a result, we could make a Blender 2.8, bear cat, at least. In that summer 2018, the first bear cat version was released, which was usable. Things were slowing down again, because everybody went back home. And could notice that we were missing a really cool team of people who worked together to do more complicated things. So I thought we have to re-organize the way how we do donations in Brondel. And that's when we started up, or restarted the Blender Development Fund, which is a membership program, a little bit inspired by Liddish Foundation. It has badges for users. People can do small donations every month, and you get a badge that shows up when you post things on the Blender website. But also with a corporate membership program, with a little bit of added benefits such as that you can directly email me, or you get a Blender developer contact that can help you to get better onboarded. But the goal of the Development Fund is solely to fund core development and do all the backend stuff, like book fixing, patch reviewing, American releases. Then in 2019, we started with a bang, we got the annual award. Within the animation industry, the annual award is top. This is the best award that they give to software companies or to people who do technology. The UPP EyeWorks Awards, we had the award with us to the Blender Conference, and people could have a little glamour for talking about making a picture with the award. We also worked on a feature film, a short film called Spring, which was in development when 2.8 was also being developed. The artists were using every day the latest checkout of master with all the bugs and all the issues, giving feedback on the usability and the stability of the software. Spring is a beautiful, poetic, fairy tale about a girl who has to bring Spring to the world. I can only advise you to watch it with good sound as your home cinema. We also have prepared a little clip with a breakdown of how things work. I think I'm running out of time, so I'm going to skip this part. Another thing happened last year, it was the Epic one. Epic announced that they had 1.2 million dollars worth of research for Blender. I don't have it on the bank, this is given in small parts over three years time, which is better for us. Epic wants us to help, wants us to make them more professional, to develop more professional for Blender. That means that we do better onboarding, more engineering practices and that kind of things. Then we did the two-part eight Blender release. This is what you see, there's the 3D drawing tools, that you can do in Blender, you can do the animation from the background. You can do all three of the models and you can do three of them. Blender Development Front exploded with five times more donations per year time. Blender Development Front is going to a million dollars, over a million dollars per year, it's only growing. We want everybody to be involved with Blender, but what that means for us. There is now a big transition going on in the Blender community and in the Blender organization. Suddenly, because corporate contributors are coming onboard, they have a different way of working. How do we avoid separating the community, which is important for Blender, from the professionals? The professionals say, I don't mind having a paid trucker and then you can have a trucker for the poor people. I don't like that. I would like to find ways to have the industry not sharing join us. I'm going to be part of the industry. I want the industry to be part of the Blender project. I would like to close with a question which I was asking myself last year as well. Why do people use Blender? I'm here at the open source conference, but I think the answer will surprise you. For example, I was at the ANC conference, the Animators conference. Lots of young people there, people 18, 19, 20 years. They were all looking at me. Apparently they knew me and they know Blender and they were like, oh wow, Tom, yeah, yeah, we love Blender. We use it as a school, we use it everywhere. Even though our teachers don't use it, we are using it. And I asked them, but why? Why are you using it? Because you are young and you can get any cracked and hacked and whatever software you want. Well, they said it is because of the community. The community is what ties us. So the community is why they are using it. It means if you go online and you want to know anything about Blender, you find out the community. Everything on 3D is about Blender. Everything is public, the people share. It is in the community spirit to do that. I have to hurry up. I also asked the same question to professionals. The studio was using Blender and they said, we use Blender because you guys care. That is why we care. Open source makers care. We care about the product, we care about the users, and we care about them. And the last thing, and that is why I was telling the story, the Blender project has a story and people like to be involved with stories. And that is the final slide. This is a famous brand diagram, the Golden Circle, and it says if you make a product, the what, then you first have to look at the why. The why are people doing things. And open source is not in the core. The open source is the how. And open source is how people can connect with technology. That was it. Thank you.
 Can people hear me?  Yes?  Okay.  So the technology is not perfect here.  I have a presentation prepared with lots of videos and videos also come with sound.  So you have to imagine the fantastic sound tracks and the sounds that you are hearing.  Maybe I'll talk a little bit through the films.  We'll see how it grows, I'll improvise a little bit.  So I wanted to start showing before I will say anything.  A little clip with a fantastic sound track, with music.  I don't know how that is done.  Here, you can press it.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, now it's down.  That was too late.  You can.  Okay, well, this was my talk in one minute.  So what I'm going to talk about is the story of Gleender, how Gleender became of age.  Gleender is actually a very, very old project that started in 1994.  I hired a small studio in Eindhoven in the south of the Netherlands.  And in that studio, we were making computer graphics and animation, video graphics, we called it mostly.  And we did some 3D as well.  And I started to redesign our in-house software, which we were using for rendering and some modeling.  And I thought, let's call it Gleender.  And this picture, what you see here is the oldest backup I could with Twix.  So you can see Blender.C and Blender.H.  It has January 294 as a date stamp.  That's the official birthday of Gleender.  So in the studio of our company, we made mostly models of buildings or product presentations.  And all the things that were not really doing film or animation with characters.  What you see here is a reel, what we did in the 92 to 96 period.  And everything you see has been made with Gleender or with our own software, what we hired at that time.  So 25 years old Rock for clients like who wanted to have video business or videotapes.  Because in the 90s, every self-respecting business had a video, right?  And then you had a clown coming in and you put a video under the corner and you showed them the corporate video.  You can imagine this is in the same period as Toy Story 1 was being made and released in 95.  Of course we were looking up to this Hollywood because they had much bigger computers and much bigger, better software than we had.  But in the end, what you see here is all made with software that runs on 2, 4 megabyte computers.  And in the end, we had 8 megabytes to do things in.  And that was a limit of the complexity that we could achieve in 3D.  At the final years of the company, I was the founder and the owner of Nio Nio, you could see that the video business would go down.  People didn't want to have corporate videos anymore, but instead the internet was coming up and of course games were coming up.  And I decided to add game creation tools in the Blender environment so that people could create a complete game in the tool and then export it to, for example, the PlayStation.  So we had an official developer kit and what you see there is just a game prototype that you could make and play in Blender on the Silicon Graphic system.  And then export it into one little Blender file which you could load on the PlayStation and then play the game.  We tried to do business with that, but nobody believed in it and everybody said, yeah, cool technology, but what's the game?  What's the game? This is the game demo, this is not a real playable game.  So I decided to sell the company's goodwill and clients to another business and I took the software to a startup center in the University of Eindhoven,  but I thought Blender was much cooler than the business I had making video graphics or games.  So I founded the company, not a number.  And with not a number, it was a one-man company.  You could see the room there as I was sitting.  That was all we had. The first thing I did was writing a manual and selling it to get some money in.  And the business idea was to give away the software for free, but not as open source.  But the software was released for everyone for free.  Then very quickly, we did the freeBSD port first.  We did Linux port.  We got help to get the Windows port working. We did the Siki, which was a little extension that you could extra features in Blender.  And we went to a share graph to show what we are doing.  And at that time, maybe all the people that I will remember, that was the days of the Internet bubble.  And in 2000, I couldn't resist.  I was still a one-man company with an intern. That was all.  And then people were coming to me and said,  Your business is worth 10 million.  Can we buy 40% of the shares for a 4.5 million investment?  Well, why not, right? So let's try this.  So in 2000, I suddenly had a company with more than 40 employees in three, four months, from one to 40,  trying to do something and conquer the market with the concept of having freeware software and commercial services around this.  Well, as you know, how it went in those days, it was burning money.  It was burning money.  I created shareholder value.  All the games that Silicon Valley is also playing is what we tried to do.  And this didn't end well.  The company shut down, it got bankrupt, it restarted for a little while.  And then in 2002, the investors told me, Tom, Blender is now going here in the drawer.  We will lock it and it's now ours.  You go do something else with your life.  I'm not going to do something else with my life, right?  I want to continue with this Blender project.  So I set up a foundation, the Don't Profit Blender Foundation,  and I could get a couple of the Blender websites back because they were under my name and not in the investor's hand.  And I launched a plan to buy back the rights of the software to make it open source.  The original rights were still of the investors at that time,  but they would agree on making Blender free software, Hanoot CPL, if we would collect via the community 100,000 euros.  After some negotiation, the investors agreed because nobody would ever pay more for the software than we could.  To my shock and surprise, we made it in seven weeks.  We did this all based on principles that were called at that time, not crowdfunding, but it was called the street performer protocol.  And this is the basis of what Kickstarter and Indiegogo started on later,  because we already used pledges, like if you say, well, if you make a target of 100k, then you have to pay.  And we had multiple levels, people could step in with extras.  It was a traditional crowdfunding.  There's a great article from the scientist about our historical crowdfront raiser,  Freak Success or First of a Tramp,  but in a way, a Blender was a freak success because it never happened again.  I've been contacted a lot by companies who went bankrupt,  and then the user said, hey, you want to buy back the code, how did you do this, how can we do this?  And it never happened, and to my knowledge, it was never a community who could buy back the software.  And actually the main reason is because I'm too stubborn to accept other people's code.  When I made Blender, there was nothing external, there was no module,  there was nothing normal engineering practices of making software.  I wrote everything myself.  So the IP of Blender was fully owned by the company.  If you go to other programs like Lightwave, or you had the SoftyMash,  and other 3D programs that stopped, the community would love to buy it back,  but the companies don't own the products that they were using in closed modules and closed libraries.  So they assembled the software, which they had the right to sell, but they don't own it.  Anyway, we had a first Blender conference, and we released Blender as a source in 2002  with the help of the Free Software Foundation Europe, Loic, I don't know if Loic is anywhere,  but thanks to the Free Software Foundation for the support,  it was a big step to convert a closed source development environment to a public system.  Then in the period after that, I had to set up an open source project, which was new for me.  I knew of course how open source works, what the principles are,  but how do you manage projects online, how do you work with communities,  how do you make decisions, what do people really like.  One of the things that helped really well was me really stepping back a bit.  I focused on the business, making sure that there was another book published saying  so I could work on Blender full time, but I let decisions and management  and this progress on Blender development, I left it to the community.  For example, there was a two-hopal tree, if they are Finnish people here,  they are now why it's called two-hopal, it's an evil tree,  there was a fork of Blender where everybody had access to, everybody.  If you wanted to have an idea, just put it in the software.  And every three months it was so unstable that we could replace it with another version,  but it works fantastic because there's a threshold for people to come on board.  The other thing that the community showed, which was so strong,  is they really work on the things that matter for them.  And I'm the person from the corporate background a little bit with the freezer,  and I go, oh wow, I want to make games and I want to have a tool where you have  interaction and linear content creation all together in one.  It's still a great idea, but maybe 20 years later now it's getting a little bit more  feasible to do that.  So instead, developer said, great idea Tom, but why don't we first fix the modeler?  Why don't we first fix the material system and get better texture and better sampling and Blender?  So they really focus on the things that matter and that matter for the users.  And that kind of open source dynamics is what I really appreciated and learned from.  That was in the first few years, we did a Blender 2.3 release with Hatterpick improvement  on the UI already, it became a little bit more usable.  So then in 2005, I was ending up with an open source project.  And even though I love to work with people on this dynamic of the community,  I also noticed that there was something missing and the typical open source projects  tend to become very technical and a little bit anti-user oriented.  Developers like to develop and like to have fun and users are sometimes kept separately.  And from my background, I was complaining there was in-house software,  I was always used to have the software to use it and developers working together on things.  And specifically for Blender, because it's a 3D tool, it is essential that you do this.  You have to get the creatives to influence how that happens with the technology and how to make it usable.  So that's why I thought, let's start a project, Project Orange,  where we invite the best 5, 6 creatives from the Blender community to Amsterdam  and let them make a compelling, interesting, great animation from  and inspire that way the community of developers online to catch up with development for them,  to have this day-to-day interaction.  That became the elephant's dream of the world's first open movie with a fantastic soundtrack.  So we were so proud when we made this.  If you look back to it now, the animation is a bit clunky and it looks a bit weird and stuff.  But don't forget, this was so amazing that we could get from the previous reel,  which was mostly cameras going around in 3D models,  we suddenly had animated characters with voices, we were acting,  and we're telling an interesting, weird story.  So for us, the elephant's dream is a milestone,  and not only because of the process of working with the developers while we're making the film,  but also because we released it at Creative Commons.  And we didn't release the film only at Creative Commons, we released everything.  From the storyboards, to the textures, to the scripts, to the test versions,  to the deleted scenes, to the whole production database of the studio was released.  And we could fund that by selling that on a dual box DVD box where the film was on,  but also you could put it in your computer, and it had all the blender files and the software,  so you could get every shot, load it, render it yourself and change it.  And that model worked fantastic to share content and to share the technology at the same time.  So I thought, it's time to do something more permanent.  I want to have a studio again, and I want to have a place where you can put developers and artists together on projects  to push the blender further.  So I found this little place in the docklands of Amsterdam, the old warehouse.  There was a bankrupt company, they still had all this crap going there.  I could rent it quite cheap, and to say, well, this is where we're going to work  and make movies and work on blender projects with our main business model DVDs.  We could put Datown DVDs, which is open source data, but you just sell the distribution,  and do crowdfunding for more films.  For example, BigBug Bunny.  That was the first film we did in the Blender Institute, and now production level really kicked in.  BigBug Bunny, I think people have seen BigBug Bunny, right?  Did you see BigBug Bunny?  I think of all our open movies, BigBug Bunny has the most views and hits on YouTube of all the films we ever did,  and that goes into the hundreds of millions.  Because it's a creative commons, people pick it up, put it on their own channel, slap advertisement on it,  and get 10 or 20 million hits.  It's fine, right? Go ahead, do it.  Here's a little clip.  As you can see, character animation quality and rendering quality improved a lot.  The expression of characters was fantastic.  Better deformation, especially hair, hair systems.  Furry animals was completely hot and big in those days.  All the animation studios were doing furry animals,  and we want to do furry animals in Blender as well.  It's horrible.  We were accused in those days of promoting violence, right?  As somebody called the genre of our movies, open source violence, right?  This is cartoon, right? In cartoon movies you have to do things to make people laugh.  This was a big success for us.  We're moving on.  Blender Institute was doing well, and the software development projects are getting bigger.  I could hire a couple of people because of our DVD sales and training, what we did.  So I thought, okay, it's time for the big leap.  People who work in open source communities have all confirmed to you  that doing a big leap is a dance of a sting.  Usually it doesn't work, and the communities like to have smaller targets.  Let's do something and then release it next week.  Everybody will say, yeah, that's awesome.  We can do something and release it maybe next month.  But let's do something and then we work on it for three years, maybe five.  Then people will say, why would I do that?  It's not really inspiring to have this kind of big target.  On the other hand, for Blender it was essential to do a couple of things to upgrade the UI  and to have more modern interaction in the software.  That is called the non-modal parallel workflow.  For example, this is how Blender 2.5 looked like.  The software became not only visible more modern,  it was also a pleasure to work with because everything kept working.  For example, you have your menu popping up.  It still could do the preview renders in the back, which was threaded,  and it could update the viewports.  So everything was done and developed in a way that it always would keep working.  Whatever you do, even when you type a text in a button,  everything in the UI stays responsive.  That makes working with the software much more pleasure.  This is standard, many software nowadays have a Blender needed as well.  Meanwhile, we had Sintel coming.  Sintel was at that time the biggest ambitious project we did,  and we ended up with a fantastic story with a real script writer,  with a young director who is a genius, he's fantastic.  So we spent much attention to the story development,  and it really became the darling of open source films,  especially when the film was taken down a couple of years ago by Sony,  accidentally because they had some music club going on,  like they won't have it for this version.  But Sony took it down, it was for four or five days, the talk of the internet,  and suddenly we found out that people really, really appreciated this film.  Of course it had lots of views online, but it was considered to be part of our free culture.  It is a free culture movie because it's open source, done with open source,  and we share everything as we usually do, and people close their hearts.  And it looked fantastic.  It was such a nice film where we show that with open source software,  and with the community, it's how it was out.  Normal people, great artists, but just people like you and me,  can make a film like that.  Come on, come on.  Okay, move along.  At that time, what I would like to note, in 2011, we started the Blemmer Network  because there was suddenly more interest for professionals to use Blemmer,  and the Blemmer Network was a website where people could connect and also offer services.  Everybody who's using software always says, especially for open source,  that it's nice, it's free, but where can I get the support?  Where can I have somebody to explain to me how it works?  Or where can I get help when I have a book and want to have it fixed?  How can I get a new feature in Blemmer or can somebody make me a script?  All of that is what people can get access to via the network.  Because the Blemmer Organization is way too small to do all this support,  and we have a worldwide community, they should do all that business.  Then I can focus on making movies and working on the software.  Another big milestone in 2011 was our render engine cycles.  This is the senior Blemmer developer, Brecht van Lommel,  he took a break and after half a year he came back and said,  how, look at what we have here.  And that was cycles.  And cycles are a way to do a physically based rendering,  high quality rendering using surface definitions,  as they have to call it, that are actually representations of how light scatters on surfaces.  It's a formula for light distribution between surfaces.  So you can use that for ray tracing to create photorealistic effects.  And suddenly technology was far enough thanks to CPUs and multi-threading and CPUs,  that you could also have ray tracing, and this high quality rendering  to be part of a 3D program and have it in the viewport,  that was real time almost.  So that's what we combined with another film, that is the Thesa Steel.  Not only we use cycles for photorealistic rendering,  what you need for visible effects film, that is what motion tracking,  that means that you can track somebody's moves,  that you can have an eye and then put a motor on it or something.  That camera reconstruction is important because you want to have, based on footage,  you want to know where is the suitable camera,  so I can act like monsters in a team to walk around.  Masking, compositing, all things you need to do for photorealistic effects.  So this was a sci-fi film playing in Amsterdam,  where the last of mankind has been locking themselves up in an old shirt,  getting attacked by an evil robot who was taking over the world,  and fighting with a lost bitch of hope.  So that's what we did.  Was it online? Was it online?  Now at that time we're going to 2013,  and I thought let's have a feature film project,  but there were now small studios around the world using render,  from America to Australia, all the way.  And let's see if we can create some kind of network and make a relay movie,  where everybody makes a path and then production moves to the next studio.  That was at Gooseberry.  The funding target was also extreme.  We needed a lot of people to support this to be able to do this.  And we did a two month campaign and we didn't make it.  It was not enough interest and motivation in the community to do something at this scale.  So that didn't work, but what did work were two other milestones.  One was we started for this initiative to blend the cloud.  But instead of having data on plastic and do business with that,  people want to have it online and accessible.  So why would you want to have all your open source creative commerce data  on a piece of plastic that's useless?  We have a website with gigabytes of data,  the whole history of the blended studios,  and people could get access to that for $10 per month.  Not only they would get access to the old films,  but we would use that subscription model to fund the next films as well.  That's how we did Cosmos Lundromat 2015,  which was another level up in quality for rendering  and with the style and with the direction and everything.  This really got us the industry, including people from Ireland,  when they needed to look at what we were doing.  I could almost do the dialogue myself.  Cosmos Lundromat is of course online.  We should watch it.  We are currently investigating Cosmos Lundromat 2,  the second part where this can become an open source series.  A LACATV series was done with offshore software,  and I think it's coming soon.  And in this scene, the guy with orange hair  tries to convince the sheep that he is so much more than a sheep.  You can get a much better line for it.  You can have a little device on a neck and etc.  You should watch it. It's beautiful.  This little reel is something that started popular online  in the Benner community.  This is a breakdown, we call it.  It shows how it works in the studio  to use 3D software to make parts of the movies.  You see experiments and tests.  One of the highlights of Cosmos Lundromat  is a big colorful tornado that comes down,  picks up the sheep and sucks it into an alternative dimension.  You can see a lot of attempts.  Another thing that went to simulation technology,  it's very popular on universities to have long students working  on open source libraries for fluid simulation,  for smoke simulation, for hair simulation,  for grass, for wind.  Everything that's part of that phenomenon  is part of a good 3D environment.  Another film we did in 2015 was a comedy film,  where we shot a camera cutting into some kind of fight  with a penguin.  You want to see how it ends?  You can go alone.  And as if it was nothing, we thought,  I thought especially, I want to have that feature from anyway,  so we are going to do it in a different way.  Instead of working with a lot of small studios around the world,  let's try to get something built in our own place in Amsterdam,  expand the business with a film studio  to make an open source pipeline for production.  A complete 100% free open source pipeline  for making animation film, based on Blender, of course,  and with other tools.  I got the rights of a famous Dutch comic series,  it's also quite well known in Belgium and Germany.  This is Agent 327, a Dutch spy who's not an 007,  so he has no license to kill, he has no budget.  He's in Holland, but there are lots of international conspiracies  of people who come to Amsterdam to get stuff done.  So it's adventurous and comedy,  target audience a little bit more than youth,  because we really like to explore making animation film  for the more avid audience.  Yes, a good place.  Agent 327.  Agent 327.  Now, this project, this was fantastic.  It turned lots of heads, it looks fantastic,  it looks like a commercial feature film,  and I was busy and ready to go around the world and sell it,  to get funding for it, but something else happened,  and that, of course, was planned at 2.8.  There was another big leap scheduled already since 2014,  is to grab Blender to another level,  to really look at industry compatibility,  and to make it easier to configure it workflow as a main theme,  and having real-time photo realistic work in the viewport.  And so that you work on things,  just like if you have a modern game engine,  that are looking almost photo realistic,  you should be able to work, create things in an environment  as if it looks real, and that's what modern 3D software does.  And another innovation that made Blender important for a lot of studios,  is the Green Spencil, you will see a little demo of that later,  where you can draw in 3D.  Not first when people thought of what,  why would I draw in 3D?  Well, it's serious, it's what storyboard is like,  but also fashion designers, card designers,  character, and grip-suit designers,  but if you can draw it very well,  and you can use 3D lines in your environment,  you can do crazy things.  All of this project for 2.8, it went way, way too slow,  it was driving on and on and on,  and I thought maybe it's better to drop this feature film for a little while  and focus on organizing 2.8 better.  So we did another interesting campaign,  we had a little rocket token, with a USB drive,  which had some things on it,  and we sold 3,200 rockets for 14 euros each,  in like, within two weeks.  And that gave us some sponsors from the corporate sponsors from the market,  gave us money to get all the core developers from Blender  for three months to come to Amsterdam  to get this whole 2.8 project working.  And we got room for a bigger studio in Amsterdam.  And this is me going around showing the place.  Local souvenir, fridge, market, and big house.  The classroom, we come with the weekly room,  we come up with some painting,  and then we have the best place, my room of course.  We have a rabbi, what was it, a grabber wood.  This is a kitchen, you can really make use of.  This was the basic of all the content.  It was all tools, band, craft, I used the glass trisors.  This is where we long mass-tipped.  Blender 2.8, part of our gallery.  But it doesn't like to be the most important role.  Our showroom!  The Akmurers 15 castles.  And at the end, the 8 of them.  The castles.  The castles square, the cool print house.  If you are in Amsterdam, you want to drop by, let us know.  We always like to have short tours, 5 minutes maybe.  But it's a fun place to see.  As a result, we could make a Blender 2.8, bear cat, at least.  In that summer 2018, the first bear cat version was released, which was usable.  Things were slowing down again, because everybody went back home.  And could notice that we were missing a really cool team of people who worked together to do more complicated things.  So I thought we have to re-organize the way how we do donations in Brondel.  And that's when we started up, or restarted the Blender Development Fund,  which is a membership program, a little bit inspired by Liddish Foundation.  It has badges for users.  People can do small donations every month, and you get a badge that shows up when you post things on the Blender website.  But also with a corporate membership program, with a little bit of added benefits such as that you can directly email me,  or you get a Blender developer contact that can help you to get better onboarded.  But the goal of the Development Fund is solely to fund core development and do all the backend stuff,  like book fixing, patch reviewing, American releases.  Then in 2019, we started with a bang, we got the annual award.  Within the animation industry, the annual award is top.  This is the best award that they give to software companies or to people who do technology.  The UPP EyeWorks Awards, we had the award with us to the Blender Conference,  and people could have a little glamour for talking about making a picture with the award.  We also worked on a feature film, a short film called Spring, which was in development when 2.8 was also being developed.  The artists were using every day the latest checkout of master with all the bugs and all the issues,  giving feedback on the usability and the stability of the software.  Spring is a beautiful, poetic, fairy tale about a girl who has to bring Spring to the world.  I can only advise you to watch it with good sound as your home cinema.  We also have prepared a little clip with a breakdown of how things work.  I think I'm running out of time, so I'm going to skip this part.  Another thing happened last year, it was the Epic one.  Epic announced that they had 1.2 million dollars worth of research for Blender.  I don't have it on the bank, this is given in small parts over three years time, which is better for us.  Epic wants us to help, wants us to make them more professional, to develop more professional for Blender.  That means that we do better onboarding, more engineering practices and that kind of things.  Then we did the two-part eight Blender release. This is what you see, there's the 3D drawing tools,  that you can do in Blender, you can do the animation from the background.  You can do all three of the models and you can do three of them.  Blender Development Front exploded with five times more donations per year time.  Blender Development Front is going to a million dollars, over a million dollars per year, it's only growing.  We want everybody to be involved with Blender, but what that means for us.  There is now a big transition going on in the Blender community and in the Blender organization.  Suddenly, because corporate contributors are coming onboard, they have a different way of working.  How do we avoid separating the community, which is important for Blender, from the professionals?  The professionals say, I don't mind having a paid trucker and then you can have a trucker for the poor people.  I don't like that. I would like to find ways to have the industry not sharing join us.  I'm going to be part of the industry. I want the industry to be part of the Blender project.  I would like to close with a question which I was asking myself last year as well.  Why do people use Blender?  I'm here at the open source conference, but I think the answer will surprise you.  For example, I was at the ANC conference, the Animators conference.  Lots of young people there, people 18, 19, 20 years.  They were all looking at me. Apparently they knew me and they know Blender and they were like, oh wow, Tom, yeah, yeah, we love Blender.  We use it as a school, we use it everywhere.  Even though our teachers don't use it, we are using it.  And I asked them, but why? Why are you using it?  Because you are young and you can get any cracked and hacked and whatever software you want.  Well, they said it is because of the community.  The community is what ties us.  So the community is why they are using it.  It means if you go online and you want to know anything about Blender, you find out the community.  Everything on 3D is about Blender.  Everything is public, the people share.  It is in the community spirit to do that.  I have to hurry up.  I also asked the same question to professionals.  The studio was using Blender and they said, we use Blender because you guys care.  That is why we care.  Open source makers care.  We care about the product, we care about the users, and we care about them.  And the last thing, and that is why I was telling the story,  the Blender project has a story and people like to be involved with stories.  And that is the final slide.  This is a famous brand diagram, the Golden Circle, and it says if you make a product, the what,  then you first have to look at the why.  The why are people doing things.  And open source is not in the core.  The open source is the how.  And open source is how people can connect with technology.  That was it. Thank you.
blender_0_395.png blender_396_851.png blender_852_1487.png blender_1488_4415.png blender_4416_15887.png blender_15888_23015.png blender_23016_33695.png blender_33696_35159.png blender_35160_35279.png blender_35280_35387.png blender_35388_35483.png blender_35484_35663.png blender_35664_39839.png blender_39840_40295.png blender_40296_41063.png blender_41064_41183.png blender_41184_41315.png blender_41316_41411.png blender_41412_47927.png blender_47928_48131.png blender_48132_48467.png blender_48468_53051.png blender_53052_53351.png blender_53352_53675.png blender_53676_53843.png blender_53844_54191.png blender_54192_58487.png blender_58488_59243.png blender_59244_59351.png blender_59352_59879.png blender_59880_65591.png blender_65592_72194.png