After serving the Blender project for over twenty years, it’s time to acknowledge that running our own internet store has become too impractical and expensive. Moreover, our financial manager Anja Vugts Verstappen, who handled the store since the early days, wishes to wind down her tasks to focus more on finances and get ready for retirement in the coming years. 

For that reason we decided to close the store by the end of the year. Obviously, all 2023 orders will be shipped and serviced in the new year as expected.

In Q1 2024, we will work on re-establishing our shirts and swag business based on using a high quality outsourcing business – as most other open source foundations currently do.

Excess stock of current products will be sold on events, like Blender Conference Amsterdam next year.

On behalf of everyone, I wish to thank Anja for her tireless work on keeping the store alive for two decades. Nobody would have been doing such a great job, you have my complete admiration for that!

Ton Roosendaal
Chairman Blender Foundation

We’re back in Los Angeles! SIGGRAPH is the absolute highlight of the year for the CG community, for scientists, developers and artists alike.

The conference will take the place at Los Angeles Convention Center, from Sunday 6th until Thursday 10th of August.

You can find Blender at the following places during the conference.

Use the code guest code BLE1161 for free tradeshow-only passes when registering on their website.
Note: the discount code has to be filled in on the top of the page where you provide address information.

More info about the conference at siggraph.org

Visitors who walked in around the offices at the Blender Headquarters, would have noticed a large variation of collectible figurines everywhere. These figurines are mostly characters from well known movies and games. Made of durable PVC, the figurines have a stunning quality and detail level that’s not possible to do with 3D printing – and certainly not as affordable. Wouldn’t it be just amazing to have a collectible series with the beloved open movie characters?

A year ago Ton Roosendaal contacted a renowned factory of designer toys, Demeng Toys in China. Working with them the Blender team learned a lot of how the production process goes for high quality characters.

It then was decided to go for a test batch of two Sprite Fright characters, 1500 copies each. If sales work out as expected, these characters then will be the first of a 30+ series of figurines, ranging all the way from Elephants Dream to the latest Blender open movie.

Last week, the container ship with the boxes arrived in the harbor of Rotterdam. Currently the goods are waiting to be declared for customs. When they arrive in the office, the figures will be sent out right away.

Standard figurine box price is 49 euro (or 49 usd). Blender Studio subscribers get 25% off on all figurine orders.

As for all products we sell on store.blender.org, the proceeds will go to fund Blender projects.

Ton Roosendaal
CEO Blender Foundation

The upcoming year is going to be interesting for Blender. Aside from the blender.org community effort to keep core functionality stable and up to date, several high profile projects have started already that – fingers crossed – might get realized this year.

OpenGL currently powers the user interface, 3D viewports and EEVEE. However it is expected to be deprecated by the industry in the coming years. Blender developers already work for many years to prepare a move away from OpenGL.

Vulkan is the cross-platform successor to OpenGL, with many opportunities to improve performance and new features like ray-tracing. Blender Foundation will invest developer time to finish a migration to the Vulkan graphics API in 2023.

In parallel – and using – this development, Apple engineers have been working on making Blender fully compatible with the Metal graphics API on macOS. This project is also expected to wrap up in 2023.

This project adds a new compositor backend, taking advantage of GPU acceleration to be performant enough for realtime interaction.

As a first step, this backend powers the new viewport compositor, which applies the result of the compositing nodes directly in the 3D viewport. Artists do not have to wait for a full render to start compositing, for faster and more interactive iterations.

The initial version of this feature will be available in Blender 3.5. The next steps are to support more nodes and features, and in the long term bring GPU acceleration to the existing compositor.

• https://code.blender.org/2022/07/real-time-compositor/

The asset system and browser will fully support brushes for painting and sculpting. This makes it easy to use, make and share bundles of brushes with others.

• https://code.blender.org/2022/11/brush-and-draft-assets/
• https://code.blender.org/2022/12/brush-assets-workflow/

Thanks to Blender’s very high level of customization using Python scripting, it’s possible to build up Blender from scratch with your own UIs and editor layouts. This combined with bundling .blend files (assets, data) you can create it to make custom tools or complete experiences.

• https://code.blender.org/2022/11/blender-apps/

Blender Foundation will launch an official community-moderated website for sharing, discovering and downloading add-ons, themes, and asset libraries.

The extensions site will only offer GNU GPL compliant software, or CC-BY–SA compatible content. No commercialization will happen on the platform. It aims to be attractive for artists and add-on developers to freely share their work on blender.org, even if they choose to be using third-party services to generate revenues with the same or similar extensions.

• https://code.blender.org/2022/10/blender-extensions-platform/

Blender’s realtime rendering engine EEVEE has been evolving constantly since its introduction in Blender 2.80. The goal was to make it viable both for asset creation and final rendering, and to support a wide range of workflows. However, thanks to the latest hardware innovations, many new techniques have become viable, and EEVEE can take advantage of them.

Expect new features such as screen-space global illumination, more efficient shading and lighting, improved volume rendering and panoramic cameras.

• https://code.blender.org/2021/06/eevees-future/

With geometry nodes getting hair support last year, this year the focus will be on simulation for physics and beyond. The system will be designed for interactivity and experimentation, with simulations running in the viewport at their own clock while editing objects and nodes.

• https://code.blender.org/2022/11/geometry-nodes-workshop-2022/

Blender developers currently use Phabricator for project management, code review and issue tracking. Unfortunately that software was discontinued, so we looked at a good replacement. The choice was to use Gitea, which is a fully free/open source software project with functionality similar to GitHub.

The main job was to migrate the full 20 years of development history of Blender to this new (Git based) software management system.

• https://code.blender.org/2022/08/gitea-diaries-part-2/

Animation and rigging is going to get a full makeover in the coming years, including making the core design future proof and many ideas to improve the experience for animators.

A large group of developers and expert animators are involved with it. Kick-off was at the last Blender Conference, you can read the report below.

• https://code.blender.org/2022/11/the-future-of-character-animation-rigging/

The grease pencil team will come with ambitious plans, there’s an exciting texture painting and sculpting speedup coming, and Hydra render delegates and other USD improvements are under development. The procedural texturing project – while not having a concrete roadmap and resources yet – is still a goal.

Most of this you will read by following the Blender Code Blog.

On behalf of everyone, best wishes for a great 2023!

Ton Roosendaal, Chairman Blender Foundation.

Finally, the 2021 (!) Blender Foundation report has been finished. Yes it’s in the eleventh hour, my apologies for that. Fortunately it was cool to look back so far, we’ve achieved a lot that year. Check it out:

Annual report 2021 (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.

All the best,

Ton Roosendaal
Chairman Blender Foundation

On behalf of everyone in the blender.org organization I hereby fully and loudly condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This illegal and murderous act in the heart of Europe threatens the peace of everyone in the world. The devastating consequences for the lives of millions of Ukrainians break our hearts. President Putin and his clique have to be stopped. We can only hope that a large majority of good willing Russians themselves find a peaceful way out of this crisis.

In the past few days we have received messages that we should block access to blender.org from Russia, or add a message in the Blender splash. This, however, is not the best thing I believe we should do. I wish to hold the principles of our mission high – to contribute to Free Software for everyone and to defend the freedom of artists and developers. I believe that our work contributes to a better world, and that we should keep doing this with more effort and conviction than ever. Blender is for everyone.

We all at Blender, jointly and individually, intend to do something to help out. For example, to aid refugees coming to the Netherlands. These actions will be done using the appropriate channels, such as the Dutch Council for Refugees. We consider that normal acts for responsible citizens and good European neighbors.

I wish everyone who has been affected by this horrible situation a lot of strength. I sincerely hope it will be over soon.

Ton Roosendaal
Chairman Blender Foundation

Below is the list of top committers to the Blender project in 2021. The amount of commits obviously doesn’t mean much, but it’s a neutral metric to put limelight on people who made Blender possible last year. 

An interesting trend is that out of these 30 names, 24 developers were employed by Blender Institute (BI) or work with a Blender Foundation Development Fund grant. I am very happy that we can support so many people now. 

Another interesting trend for 2021, which does not show in the statistics yet, is that we get increasing development attention (patches and commits) from larger corporations. In alphabetical order I wanted to thank the developers from AMD (GPU support for Cycles), Meta (Cycles performance), Intel (Cycles, rendering and CPU optimization) and Nvidia (GPU and ray-tracing support for Cycles, USD).

Alexander Gavrilov (43)
Russia, developer, independent. Alexander is an active member of the Animation and Rigging module.

Howard Trickey (44)
USA, developer, independent. Howard is owner of the Modeling module and an enthusiast mentor of new developers.

Charlie Jolly (49)
UK, developer, Independent. Charlie is an all-round developer contributing patches in many areas of Blender, including GPencil and Geometry Nodes.

Pablo Vazquez (50)
Argentina, Blender evangelist and part time developer, BI employee. Aside from his work on blender.org communication and video streams, Pablo is a member of the UI module, contributing to the 3.0 looks.

Pablo Dobarro (51)
Spain, principal developer, full-time grant (but now on a break). Pablo is the main contributor to sculpting and painting tools in Blender.

Ankit Meel (56)
India, developer, full-time grant. Ankit works on the trackers for triaging and bug fixing.

Falk David (60)
Germany, developer, part-time grant. Falk started as triager and developed interest in the GPencil module. He is now employed by a renowned Spanish animation studio to work on Blender.

Johnny Matthews (62)
USA, developer, independent. Johnny is back! As a regular contributor in the 2000s he still knows the Blender codebase very well. Johnny is a member of the Nodes and Physics module.

Ray Molenkamp (68)
Canada, developer, independent. Ray leads the platform module and is the go-to person in the Blender chat channels, ask him anything, he knows!

Sebastian Parborg (75)
Sweden, developer, Blender Studio employee. Sebastian is the main Studio connection with the developers, assisting the artists during production with bug and feature fixes. He is also coordinating the NPR rendering team.

Kévin Dietrich (92)
France, developer, full-time grant. Kévin works as a core team member of the Cycles module, working on production features and performance.

YimingWu (93)
China, developer, part-time development grant. Yiming is both an artist and a developer with special interest in line rendering.

Harley Acheson (95)
Canada, developer, independent. Harley is an active member of the UI module.

Dalai Felinto (99)
Brazil, development coordinator, BI employee. Dalai leads the BI developer team and is product designer for the Nodes project.

Manuel Castilla (103)
Spain, developer, half-time grant. Manual is a new member of the Compositor module in Blender, working alongside Jeroen.

Clément Foucault (142)
France, principal developer, BI employee. Clement is the lead designer of Eevee and GPU rendering in Blender. He works on Eevee 2.0 and viewport compositing, but his main accomplishment is the (ongoing) migration of OpenGL to Vulkan in Blender. This is expected to wrap in 2022.

Aaron Carlisle (162)
USA, developer/writer, half-time grant. Aaron keeps the user manual on docs.blender.org working. He’s increasingly turning into an all-round developer.

Sergey Sharybin (210)
Russia, principal developer, BI employee. Sergey made a splash in 2021 by teaming up with Brecht redesigning and implementing the Cycles X rendering engine.

Richard Antalik (214)
Czech Republic, full time grant. Richard works as a triager and is the key contributor to video editing in Blender.

Antonio Vazquez (217)
Spain, senior developer, independent. Antonio is the lead developer of the Grease Pencil module in Blender. GPencil is a key reason for bigger studios to get into Blender. It all starts with concept artists and storyboarders!

Sybren A. Stüvel (266)
Netherlands, senior developer, BI employee. Sybren turned the animation module in Blender into one of the most active groups. He also leads USD efforts for Blender and heads up the Asset project.

Philipp Oeser (281)
Germany, developer, BI employee. Phillipp leads the triaging, bug fixing and patch reviewing efforts on blender.org. 

Julian Eisel (362)
Germany, developer, BI employee. Julian is a core member of the UI module. Most of 2021 he worked on making the Asset browser in Blender work.

Germano Cavalcante (372)
Brazil, developer, full time grant. Germano’s main task is triaging and bug fixing, but is increasingly active in the modeling and rendering modules.

Jeroen Bakker (423)
Netherlands, senior developer, BI employee. Jeroen is part of the rendering team, the goto person for everything viewport and GPU related.

Brecht Van Lommel (424)
Belgium, principal developer, BI employee, rendering architect. Brecht made 2021 memorable with a highly sophisticated redesign of Cycles, embraced by all leading CPU/GPU manufacturers in the world.

Bastien Montagne (506)
France, developer, BI employee. Bastien is an owner of the core module, his main concern is to keep Blender files and overrides work.

Jacques Lucke (700)
Germany, senior developer, BI employee. Jacques is the lead engineer of the Geometry Nodes project.

Hans Goudey (854)
USA, developer, full time grant. Hans is a highly valued member of the Geometry Nodes project.

Campbell Barton (1873)
Australia, principal developer, full time grant. Campbell is indispensable, he contributes to nearly every core module in Blender.

I wish all of the people above, and everyone who contributed to Blender a healthy and happy 2022!

Ton Roosendaal
Amsterdam, 31-12-2021

Blender Foundation is delighted to announce Intel Corporation as the latest Patron Member of the Foundation’s Development Fund. By upgrading its membership to a top-level contributor, Intel’s support helps Blender provide creators an optimal experience on modern CPUs and GPUs.

“Intel is extending its collaboration and commitment to the Blender open-source community. We are already incorporating the oneAPI cross-architecture, CPU- and GPU-driven features and performance of Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit libraries into Blender to benefit creators of all kinds. We share the Blender Foundation’s mindset to make world-class visual technologies available to everyone through open-source software and open standards.” said Raja Koduri, Intel senior vice president and general manager of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) Group.

With Intel signing up as Patron, Blender now has top level support from all major CPU and GPU manufacturers. We look forward to further work with Intel’s open source initiatives such as Embree and Open Image Denoise to accelerate computing for creative purposes.

Ton Roosendaal
Chairman Blender Foundation
Amsterdam, 21-12-2021

Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and/or other countries.

What is the Blender Development Fund?

The Blender Development Fund accepts donations to support activities to provide free and open accessible services for all Blender contributors – including professionals and corporations – on the blender.org website. Support activities include bug fixing, code reviews, technical documentation and onboarding.
The fund will also provide grants and subsidies to developers on generic and widely agreed development projects.

Learn more at fund.blender.org

Decentraland is the first fully decentralized virtual world. Its vision is to hand over control to the people who create and play in this virtual space. The DAO (“Decentralized Autonomous Organization”) behind Decentraland decided in a recent community town hall meeting to join the Blender Development Fund for a period of two years, as Patron Member.

The fight for an open metaverse will define the 2020s and Blender is one of the most important open source projects in the 3D creator ecosystem. “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

Jin, founding Decentraland member

Blender Foundation uses the Development Fund to support and fund developers on core development tasks, topics that have a wide endorsement in the contributor community of blender.org. Check for the roadmap proposal ’22 and ’23 on the code blog.

Welcome Decentraland! We for sure share your mission to make sure artists and creators are being enabled and supported to access open metaverse initiatives on the web.

Also: check the announcement on Decentraland.

Blender Foundation, November 2021