I'm guessing the Blender guys are raising 2 million for their current film.. I may be wrong, but is 200 something.. $200K ?? How they entice people to support the project is to include their names in the credits, and the donation includes a copy of the DVD when the movie comes out. But Ton's really good at media production.. When he released blender, it was about a year and he produced a 200 page manual that looked unlike anything I've ever seen of a free product. His previous company, NeoGeo made multimedia presentations for its clients, they even attempted to turn blender into something they could publish Sony Playstation games on, that's where the source of game blender originally came from. The reason they don't really develop game blender is because blender is all C code, and Game blender is written in C++. Anyhow, they use these projects like Elephant's Dream, Big Buck Bunny and Durian, to develop the software by listening to what the animators need to do the work, then any tools they make they put out into open source. Because blender was developed as an in-house tool, that's how it got developed before it ever was freeware, and later open source. They work with the animators that work on the movie and code up the tools needed, or I guess address the developers to make the tools needed. But they tend to finish their major releases before SIGGRAPH, and with that major release comes the movie. This time it didn't seem like they did that. Mainly because what they are planning for this release sounds very challenging (everything animateable [and controllable with expressions] and construction history).
Note: Maya, Softimage, Houdini, 3DsMax are known for construction history features. I know Softimage has animateable construction history. Houdini is the best for it. 3DsMax uses stack based construction which blender seems to support now. But lack of plugin support doesn't make it as capable as 3DsMax. The reason blender doesn't use plugins is to encourage that everyone has the same tool to do work so that everyone can share files and learn. Plugins would make blend files incompatible, so it's more a concern of what should or shouldn't be in blender. Maya has scriptable construction history, I think this is what they are targeting for blender 2.50. If Blender has scriptable construction history then scripts could be made to do the work (with python) that would otherwise require a plugin. Note, the files in blender are forward and backward compatible, part of the reason for that is that the features that were in it from day one are mostly still in it, so all the blend file is is a binary dump of the data structures in blender.
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