The 2023 Blender Foundation report is now publicly available. Download it at Annual report 2023 (pdf).

Thanks so much for the support we’ve had from you and/or your organizations. Thanks to the Development Fund we could make a real impact; to improve the lives and creative endeavors of many people.

The report is free to share, please do!

SIGGRAPH (the premier conference & exhibition on computer graphics and interactive techniques) will take place in Denver (CO) at the Denver Convention Center, from Sunday 28th July until Thursday 1st August.

Besides the unusual location, there are a few highlights for this trip. The Blender team delegation is minimal, yet at the same time Blender will be visible everywhere:

Next to that, there will be a screening of Wing It! at the Electronic Theatre as part of the computer animation festival, and Blender will be visible at a demo pod the Dell booth in the trade show. If you are at SIGGRAPH and want to connect feel free to reach out directly via mail (francesco at blender org) or on social media!

Let’s recap yet another successful Annecy experience for the Blender team. This year we had a corner booth at the film market, a short film selected in the festival, and a studio meet-up event in the city center.

The film market went well. At this point everyone is well aware of Blender’s existence, and there is a growing amount of professional users successfully tackling more and more complex challenges with the software.

I had informal conversations with several high-budget film directors and story artists using and praising Blender for the story development process. Adoption into the production pipeline is still slow for large organization, while in smaller, younger and more agile studio, using Blender at the core is simply the norm. From those studios, there is an active interest in the Blender Studio Tools a set of scripts, add-ons and documentation aimed at facilitating collaborative work in a Blender-centric environment.

There has been a growing trend in the past few years, where individuals and teams come by to share the work in progress on their production, or to let us know that the production was successfully completed. This year, several production were selected and screened at the festival – also winning awards. Congratulations to FLOW (feature film, 4 Awards), The car that came back from the sea (short film, 2 awards), Pictoplasma “opener 2023” (1 award), and The Worlds Divide (feature film).

The Blender for Breakfast event was a great opportunity to create connections between professionals and get a glimpse of the growing Blender-based studio landscape. Will definitely repeat next year.

Finally, special thanks to Dell for supporting us with a demo workstation during the event, so we could present high quality demos of the brushstroke technology from the Gold project, and more.

Blender is truly making it possible for filmmakers to create and share excellent work. See you next time!

A small delegation of the Blender team (Dalai Felinto and Francesco Siddi) is going to attend the Game Developers Conference – GDC in San Francisco on 18-22 March, with the main goal to connect with individuals and teams using Blender to create interactive content.

This year we are also organizing a Blender for Breakfast event (Birds of a Feather-style), focused on connecting producers, developers, TDs and artists working in studios where Blender is part of the pipeline. The goal is to share ongoing Blender development, Blender Studio pipeline insights, and give visibility to teams who wish to share their experience using Blender in production. All while being treated some delicious coffee and pastries!

The event will take place on Tuesday, 19 March at 9:00AM at Sightglass Coffee, 270 7th St, San Francisco. Limited spots are available, make sure you RSVP if you are interested. See you there!

Last weekend, I attended two open-source focused events in Brussels: OFE (Open Forum Europe) and FOSDEM, with the goal of establishing and fostering Blender’s connection with the free and open source community. Here is a recap of the experience.

Attending OFE was an opportunity to witness some of the dynamics that define European regulations and policies with regard to free and open source software.

Most of the focus was on open source as a means to aid economic development and maximize the value of public investment in technology. Another widely discussed topic was the CRA (Cyber Resilience Act), and the implications on open source projects.

Several well-known free software organizations were present (Apache Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Linux Foundation, NLnet Foundation, etc) next to figures from various European governance organizations, as well as and handful of free software contributors and developers.

It was useful to connect with new with people and listen to new voices. Despite the complexities that come with long-term planning and European politics, the future for open source looks bright!

Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at FOSDEM. It’s like an open source festival! Attending FOSDEM allowed reconnecting in real life with project like Godot, Matrix, Thunderbird, Kdenlive, Freecad and many more. 

The connection that Blender has with the open source community must be fostered and the Blender project should look into being more visible in this event in the coming years.

This was a great start of the year, with many events such as GDC, BCONLA and Annecy to look forward to. See you soon! 

Francesco

Today Blender turns 30 years old! To celebrate this milestone, Blender Foundation organized a donation drive during the month of December 2023. The theme was “a gift for Blender”, inviting everyone to contribute with a gift, no matter big or small, to show support for the project and to ensure its independence as it keeps growing up.

The campaign was a success, with over 10000 gifts, evenly divided between one-time donations and Development Fund memberships, raising over 200k EUR in one month. Thank you to everyone who donated!

While this has been an amazing journey, there’s no point in stopping to reminisce on each step of the way. To express this feeling, the team has put together a little video.

Here’s to the next 30 years!

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – The Blender Foundation today announced an ambitious community-wide fundraiser to triple its donations before the end of the year in celebration of its 30th anniversary. This campaign, themed “A gift for Blender,” aims to secure at least 10,000 donations to support the continued development and maintenance of the beloved free and open-source 3D creation software.

Blender is free for everyone. However, developing and maintaining the project is not without cost. These costs are covered by donations from thousands of individuals and several corporations. While having a good relationship with corporations is important, individual donations from users are crucial, as they allow Blender to remain an independent community project.

To encourage participation, supporters of the December donation drive will receive a special “30 Years” badge in their Blender ID and have their name permanently recorded in the donation logs. 

The Blender Foundation invites individuals and organizations to join the 30th anniversary fundraiser and make a gift to Blender. Every donation, no matter the size, contributes to the continued success of development projects at blender.org and Blender’s ability to empower creative expression around the world.

About the Blender Foundation

The Blender Foundation is a public benefit organization that supports the development of Blender, a free and open-source 3D creation suite used by millions of artists, designers, filmmakers, and professionals worldwide. The foundation is committed to ensuring that Blender remains a powerful, free and open-source tool for creative expression and innovation.

Contact: 

Ton Roosendaal, Blender Foundation
foundation@blender.org

Between 18 and 22 November 2023, the blender.org website was affected by a DDoS attack, executed by a botnet with hundreds of IP addresses sending over 1.5 billion malicious request, at a peak rate of 100 thousand rps (request per second). The website was intermittently available for a few days until going offline on November 21. The issue was resolved by moving behind a dedicated DDoS mitigation service, and the attack stopped at the end of the day. Besides the main blender.org website, a few other services were made unavailable – they are actively being restored.

Responsibility for the attack has not been claimed, and motives are unknown. The attack was focused on denial of service. Project and user data have not been affected.

Special thanks to the team that has been working around the clock to resolve this: Anna, Arnd, Danny, Oleg, Pablo and Sergey. Also thanks to everyone who reached out offering help and support!

Since Saturday, 18 November, the blender.org servers are under a DDoS attack; bringing down our servers by overloading them with requests. The administrators have been working on it non-stop. Attempts to block IP ranges from attackers did not work, as they quickly came back from other locations. 

Moreover, in the short periods they don’t attack blender.org, pending logs of regular requests overload the servers again, sending the infrastructure into a loop of self-destruction.

After four days of fending off the attacks, the team decided to move the core of our website to a secure service that provides DDoS protection. This means that www.blender.org is back!

2023-11-18. Initial signs of malicious traffic on the blender.org website, mitigated by blocking offending addresses.

2023-11-19. Malicious traffic intensifies to the point of intermittently interrupting availability of the blender.org website.

2023-11-20. Several blender.org services (developer forum, wiki, etc.) are unavailable due to excessive traffic. Blocking IP ranges is no longer effective.

2023-11-21. Attack reaches full scale, requiring for the blender.org services to be fully stopped. A decision is made to move behind a dedicated DDoS mitigation service. At the end of the day the blender.org website is available again, operating normally.

2023-11-22 01:30. The attack is still ongoing, peaking at over 5 million requests per minute. While most of www.blender.org functionality is back to normal, there are still a few issues:

• Users might presented with a “challenge” to verify that they are not a bot before visiting the website
• blender.org (without www) is still not accessible, due to technical reasons. If you want to visit blender.org, make sure you type www.blender.org
• Several websites are still unavailable (code, developer, docs, devtalk, download, wiki, etc.) – and we keep working to bring them back.

2023-11-22 10:30. The attack has stopped. We continue working to restore all other websites today.

2023-11-22 20:30. All blender.org sites are back online and operating normally. Unfortunately another attack has started, but it’s being mitigated and should not be affecting the website experience.

2023-11-23 20:30. The attack has stopped. In total over 2.1B requests (up to 100K rps) were mitigated. We consider the issue closed for now, and will only report further if the user experience on blender.org is affected.

Francesco Siddi
COO – Blender

Blender Foundation and the online developers community are proud to present Blender 4.0!

Blender 4.0 is the first step towards a new iteration of Blender, and delivers a number of new feature and workflow improvements across all areas.

To highlight a few:

• New Principled BSDF shader
• AgX view transform for improved color handling
• Light linking in Cycles
• Node Tools, powered by Geometry Nodes
• Repeat zones in Geometry Nodes
• New Snap Base for improved placement and transform workflows
• “Type to search” and various UI improvements, including a new default font
• New animation curve editing operators
• Bone collections
• and so, so much more

The Human Base Meshes bundle got an update with new models and improved topology.

Explore the release notes for an in-depth look at what’s new.

This work is made possible thanks to the outstanding contributions of the Blender community, and the support of the over 3500 individuals and 37 organizations contributing to the Blender Development Fund.

Happy Blending! 

The Blender Team
November 14th, 2023