Hi, Money is very welcome. Industry users can do two things:
1) Let their company sign up for the development fund: https://www.blender.org/foundation/development-fund/ (We get about 100 grand per year, which is 1% of what C4D users give to Maxon annually). 2) Hire developers yourself! Or assign your own developers part time on IO for Blender. A crowd-funder for 1 feature only is very risky. What precisely do we define to fund? Who would crowdfund a developer to just fix bugs and maintenance for 2 years? I doubt people would pay for that. I wouldn't even know where to find such a coder... For 2.8 we can do a big fund raiser, and include this on the work planning. I think professionals rather see us to keep working on the whole pipeline, starting with good PBR shader editing in viewports. -Ton- -------------------------------------------------------- Ton Roosendaal - [email protected] - www.blender.org Chairman Blender Foundation - Producer Blender Institute Entrepotdok 57A - 1018AD Amsterdam - The Netherlands > On 10 Feb, 2016, at 16:13, Fergal Gribben <[email protected]> wrote: > > I agree with Fabio and David - if industry users are so reliant on FBX > support within Blender, then crowdfunding/hiring a developer to work > specifically on FBX support is probably worth investigating. From what > Bastien has said, keeping up with the latest FBX format sounds like a major > pain, and from what I can tell, focusing efforts on supporting glTF or USD > would be time better spent. > > A professional Unity license costs $75 a month, a 3DS Max subscription with > basic support costs €238 a month, and a Maya LT subscription with basic > support costs €35.70 a month > > If lacking FBX support in Blender would cause people to switch to > expensive, proprietary software, is it too much to ask that they instead > donate to FBX development within Blender? If industry users were to donate > a fraction of the aforementioned licensing costs on a monthly basis, > perhaps that would be enough support for a dedicated FBX developer? > > I believe EpicGames donated €10k to the development fund for better FBX > support in the past ( > https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/485431565447868416) - is that too > ambitious a goal for crowdfunding? > > And just to weigh in with my own personal experiences as a hobbyist game > dev: the FBX format terrifies me! :) Personally, I couldn't make sense of > the file format, especially when it came to animations, so I instead > decided to create my own file format for my game engine. At least that way > I know exactly what information is available to me, and I know that any > bugs I encounter are related to my game engine's implementation, and not > due to how Blender has exported the scene. The same applies to a lot of > other hobbyist/home users I know, either they get by with the .obj format, > or they roll their own. Furthermore, any inconsistencies with my own file > format are easily identified and fixed, whereas FBX to me was a bit of a > black box. > > I guess what I'm trying to say is, the FBX format seems much more important > to users who work in the industry, rather than home/hobbyist users, and I > think if the demand was there as much as industry users have conveyed, a > push for donations/crowdfunding would be enough to achieve better FBX > support. > > On 10 February 2016 at 14:57, Vicente Carro <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Well, instead of crowdfunding, that I think it's not going to work, I would >> suggest to officially (Ton) talk with Unreal, Unity, Valve and maybe some >> of the blender partners and expose the problem to them. If possible make >> them talk all together. Since all of them have some interest in FBX working >> in Blender probably they can agree to have a guy maintaining FBX for >> Blender or to give us other solution. >> >> Vicente >> >> On 10 February 2016 at 14:48, David Fenner <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> 2016-02-10 11:28 GMT-03:00 Fabio Pesari <[email protected]>: >>> >>>> , but if it "dies" in >>>> terms of fewer contributions due to poor funding, it will be exactly >>>> because of people who would rather buy* expensive proprietary programs >>>> than donate at least 1/3 of that money to Blender. Why the double >>> standard? >>>> * = in some cases, rent, because many of those other programs use DRM >>>> and are subscription-based. >>> >>> >>> Talking about double standard here is waaay too idealistic. Users buy >>> software when they need to, and when open source software meets all their >>> needs, they donate when they can or want. Still, having thousands of >> users >>> using blender is still better for the software, since studios do develop >>> for blender for time to time, they also contribute bug reports, ideas, >>> sometimes money, and they spread the use of the software, which makes big >>> studios start to develop also for blender. Is an ecosystem based on >> users. >>> Sadly, people don't appreciate what they have until they can lose it, and >>> that's what I'm saying that maybe fbx export should be crowdfunded. >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Bf-committers mailing list >>> [email protected] >>> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> Bf-committers mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers >> > _______________________________________________ > Bf-committers mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
