When Ton mentioned his idea of interviewing different people from the industry, the name of Angela Plohman came out right on top. “She is so sharp and knowledgeable.” Currently Executive VP of Strategy, Finance and Operations at the Mozilla Foundation, involved in high-level topics about the future of technology, Angela Plohman worked at Blender in the early days of the Foundation, around 2004-2007. As a freelancer, she helped Ton on many structural aspects: she organized multiple BCONs, managed a large European subsidy, took care of artists working on the first open movie and was, overall, a great support and facilitator.

Angela was involved during a key moment of Blender, when Elephants Dream was in production and the first structural pillars were set. Since then, a deep respect and mutual admiration has remained between her and Ton – for those reasons, this conversation was less about the technology and more about the human side of Blender.

What does the nonprofit executive remember from her time at Blender, more than 15 years ago? “I really, truly do not remember how Ton found me… He was looking for help on more operational matters, plus he had just got a EU grant. Quite complex, a lot of paperwork. You know, there was no Institute at the time, it was mostly Ton doing everything by himself. And a lot of volunteers, which was kind of incredible. […] It was definitely the wild west there for a little bit. Ton doesn’t like rules, or things that feel like they stop him from doing something and you know, european funding is 90% rules and 10% money. It was an interesting challenge but also taught me a lot about being creative with how you can work within the system to get something that you want. Which is something very characteristic about Ton, he will find a way to get to the place that he wants. Which can be challenging for some people, but is also mostly a learning experience for everybody.”

This is what came out the most during our conversation, Ton’s tenacity: “Ton is a very inspiring person. […] He is very unafraid […] and doesn’t compromise what his vision is. Which was so inspiring for me too. He has such a strong perspective and confident vision. He knows so clearly what opportunities [are in reach] and is great at not being distracted.”

Obviously, with such a strong key figure at its core, we can’t help but wonder what will become of the project once Ton steps back. “He is an iconic figure. [But] Blender without Ton: it has to be possible. [This question] is common with strong founders who’ve remained involved over a long period of time.” Angela then explained how she sees the parallel with Mozilla and Mitchell Baker, current CEO for the Corporation, Chairwoman for the Foundation, who has been playing a key role there since the very first days of Mozilla. People look up to her, and to Ton, as the embodiment of their respective creation – but people are not eternal, and even founders deserve a break.

So how do you set up the future? All in all, it is about “how to empower others to create their own vision […] Ton is good at attracting people and making them work together. […] If the open-source world wants to thrive, it has to have faith in the community aspect, and not in that ‘genius leader – godlike figure’ […] Looking at the photos on the annual report, there are people who have been there for a really long time as well. Artists that have been committed to working with Blender, kind of champions out in the world, whether at the Institute or in their own places of work. I think those people, playing that role of champion, knowing what the values are that underpin Blender, being able to separate them from Ton’s values – the project itself is so strongly set up.” Later in our discussion, she adds “I’m very curious about what discussions are being had around [that subject] because you do need leadership. That can take so many different forms, it doesn’t have to be in a single human […] When you write the story of Blender over 20 years, making a choice around not making it the story of Ton but the story of Blender is gonna be a really key piece for setting up the future.”

For the future? We have to empower others to create their own vision.

Angela Plohman

Looking back at her own connection with the open-source community, Angela recalls: “the [Blender] conference was very meaningful to me. It’s interesting because you could compare it a bit to the Mozilla Festival – this gathering place where the people who care passionately about the issues and Blender really come together in this beautiful way, people are so generous, kind, and open, and sharing, creative. It felt like a big family of people who wanted that to succeed. […] I made so many significant connections.” As a person who has strived to link arts and technology, she loved “facilitating great ideas” “seeing developers from up close, understanding their language and building trust. I think I’m a very good translator between developers and organizers or artists; speaking those languages without having to be an expert is a skill to truly facilitate, and it’s always been exciting for me to connect in that way.” “doing the Blender conferences was always a trust building exercise, to show up for the community and help people.” Blender is certainly a place where different points of view not just collide, but embrace each other. Surrounded by artists, developers, makers, people with ideas but also the will and skills to bring them to life: connections are made. “Ton has always been about demonstrating through making. It inspired me in other ways, around how you can fuse the creative act of making with the tools-side of things, and that both can reinforce one another.”

To Angela Plohman, there aren’t any specific milestones that stand out, but rather “points that propelled the project into a different level of maturity.” Of course, she still thinks of the first open movie as “a pivotal moment” in setting up the future at that time, working more permanently with artists, but her vision is mostly “a nostalgic memory [of it all]” and not as much a bird’s eye view on development, be it technical or company-wide. When asked about a possible collaboration between Mozilla and Blender, for example on some meta-world work, she admits to not being around those conversations. However, she quickly adds that “When I started at Mozilla, everyone knew Blender.”, thus laying Ton’s concerns to rest – Blender is indeed visible in that part of the open-source world. We may even have mentioned some connection between the work Angela did at Blender and her start at Mozilla, although we would neither deny nor confirm that statement – “we wouldn’t hear the end of it with Ton!”, we joked.

“When I left [Blender], the Institute was becoming more formalized. I am a little bit amazed by how much it’s grown, how much output there has been.” Amazed, “but not surprised!” she quickly adds. “Ton probably has been more ambitious than I expected” which is saying a lot when we see Plohman’s track record in the tech, culture and art world. She is definitely a person who seeks to push boundaries.

It felt like a big family of people who wanted [the project] to succeed.

Angela Plohman

What about the next steps? As a key member of her organization, Angela can’t help but see the parallel: “Mozilla just turned 25, too, and we’ve had our own highs and lows of relevance. Our whole campaign around this is not looking back but really looking at what the next 25 years will hold.” On open source at large, Angela wishes “to show that we can develop a successful product or projects with values, ethics and the greater good in mind.  With a healthy and diverse community that represents a true global perspective. Because not all open-source projects are the same, some have a toxic culture. […] Open source is a concept that’s very specific, and it’s the motivations behind it that I find interesting. Around alternatives to centralized technology superpowers. [I want] to keep pushing for the good of society. For instance, with the Mozilla Foundation we’ve started researching 4 years ago about trustworthy AI; now it’s exploded everywhere in the mainstream and there’s no ethical framework.” Thus the goal for an organization like Blender should be “to inject your values into the way things are done. Whatever the technical path, it should be an opportunity to show up as a leader and illustrate how to commit for the public good.” She notes that the way Blender is structured with a nonprofit Foundation at its core, similarly to Mozilla, is already a visible commitment to ethical values: we should be talking about those values, and make sure the contributors can be true champions, not just of the project, but also of those values, at their day job. There is leverage in that community, and Blender should continue to support it strongly.

“Where Blender has been very successful: it’s not only about the technology, but it’s how do you build and foster a community that can work well too support the bigger picture – it’s really hard work and not everyone wants to do that work with the same amount of care for human beings and their volunteer contributions in a lot of the time.”

All in all, Blender should focus on “Prioritizing the health and value of the work while also having a business-minded approach – so, not losing its soul”, even though Ton can be seen, in many ways, as the soul of the project. According to Angela, we have to “protect the desire to contribute, communicate, while it is also important to keep a business mindset to move forward and keep the ambition alive.” As a trailblazer in the community-driven world, Blender should be a role model for other organizations and people: we can do tech, we can innovate, we can give more power to the people, and as a mission-driven organization, we must do it with clear goals and strong moral values.

For Angela, it seemed that our discussion brought a lot of good memories from her time in Amsterdam. Some I can even relate to, now that I have joined the team at the HQ in a very similar position. Apart from all the business and ethical topics, I could see an idea taking shape: from the start, Blender and Ton were ambitious, very ambitious. Though, Ton was no fool and tried to surround himself with smart, motivated people, as passionate about their area of expertise as he’s always been about his own project.

This is something that does transpire from the last 20 years: Blender is driven by its diverse community, through and through, from the earliest volunteers to the highly-skilled developers, while also including the people who supported the project in many other ways. The people at its core, adding their own vision and ambitions to Ton’s. It seems like quite a solid basis for the next 20 years.

Jono Bacon is a well known face in the open-source community. As stated on his website, Jono is a leading community and collaboration speaker, author, and podcaster. He is the founder of Jono Bacon Consulting which provides community strategy/execution, workflow, and other services. He previously served as director of community at GitHub, Canonical, XPRIZE, and OpenAdvantag, he consulted and advised a range of organizations, including Blender. In 2020, when Ton was reconsidering his position at Blender in the light of his illness, he reached out to Jono to get insight on what the future of Blender could be.

This wasn’t the first time Jono and Ton met, of course. Ton can recall getting the Best use of CG with Linux Open Source Award from Jono’s hands in 2006, for the first open movie Elephants Dream. This was one key moment of recognition by the open-source community. To go over the last twenty years and discuss Blender’s legacy, we had to give a voice to an open-source persona.

Jono Bacon discovered Blender around 1999, when he had “this wild aspiration to create a 3D movie”. His personal interest in both CG and open source naturally pushed him towards Blender. Plus “it was a killer app on Linux!” He can recall following the Free the Sources campaign with enthusiasm: it turned Blender into one of the first open-source softwares that wasn’t an OS.

Since then, Jono hasn’t stayed close to the project but still has an interest and thus an opinion about it. “I don’t have anything negative to share”, although Jono remembers “the bad reputation” that Blender had in the early days, for being “difficult to use”. However, he quickly notes that “lots of work went into the usability, making it easier to use, much more intuitive”. Today, “Blender can be compared to Linux, Kubernetes, Docker, npm, Angular, React […] It is miles ahead of other open-source creative tools.”

When discussing Blender’s development and what it did well, Jono has a few examples in mind: “There’s so much to be proud of! […] The sheer technological progress is amazing […] and what I truly admire, [in an artistic-centric project] is finding developers to build really, technically, mathematically challenging software and doing that without being paid for it: it’s a huge accomplishment.” It is admirable that “Blender made the community attractive not only to artists but also to engineers. Thanks to Ton, first, for being an open and transparent man, about the technology, where the weaknesses are.” It allowed Blender to build a diverse community.

And it is that community which is Blender’s most striking singularity. “I think there’s a real personality around the Blender community […] I remember going to my first Blender event in Amsterdam, in that miniature castle. I didn’t really know anybody, I had only talked to Ton over email. There was a real sense of fun and excitement, a real togetherness. And that’s special.” As an Englishman himself, Jono also notes that, although that could be construed as a stereotype,  “It is very European too, uniquely Dutch: generous, fun, no bullshit.” A particularity that Jono also sees in European open-source gatherings, compared to the ones held in America: “There’s a less formal [vibe], it’s looser.” But what is our community, if not one that produces high quality content? “There’s a very high level of accomplishments, in software, documentation… A significant amount of output, when a lot of other open-source communities don’t have output. A lot of other open-source projects tend to be in the engineering, enterprise space […] thus it’s easier to fund development, whereas Blender does not have such a direct line of revenue. Plus this output is diverse: Reddit, Blender Today, Blender Nation, Blender Chat… the Blender community is both productive and pragmatic.”

The diverse output from the Blender project are also reflected in “a real focus on education and learning; there are so many resources out there” and, of course, all the open movies: they are “a profound achievement, a genius move” as it is “rare to see an open-source project invest outside of the software.” All those elements come together to build a true ecosystem that attracts different people for different reasons, but with the same end goal: create a better tool, year after year, together, to be always more free to create.

When it comes to recognition in the open source movement, Jono has a different perspective from Ton: “Ton is one of the most important members in the history of open source [for a couple of reasons] And the fact that he’s done it with such grace and empathy, he [truly is recognized as] a nice guy.” Blender is visible, and “if you know what Blender is, even just on the surface, it is widely regarded and much loved.” Jono then goes on to take a personal example: a few kids at his ten-year-old son Jack’s school are learning how to use Blender, for fun. The fact that it is a software used in the professional world is very attractive to them, and the fact that it is free and open puts it in their reach.

“Maybe what Ton means [with this question] is that not a lot of people know about Blender. And it is true, compared to other projects that have less accomplishments and get more communication. It is a more niche tool. Because a lot more people are focused on infrastructure or enterprise projects in the open-source world. Blender isn’t alone though, the same pattern applies to other ‘non tech facing tools’: InkScape, VLC, Linux Desktop, Libre Office.”

What about Blender’s future? How does Jono, someone who’s followed the project since before it was even open source, imagine the next years? And what about Ton’s legacy?

“There is so much cultural and institutional knowledge wrapped up in him. [….] Obviously, it will be the end of an era. The act of stepping down means you create systems and workflows to be viable without, to be healthy. […] A transition needs to happen.”

Regarding the direction that Blender should focus on, Jono had a few ideas. For the next ten years, “My gut feeling is, and take that with a pinch of salt of course, Blender should incorporate AI into it, to make it really easy to formulate rich environments. Imagine giving [a prompt] to the AI about creating a planet like Mars. […] It could get it super close and could be used as a base to then tweak. Generative AI. […] This would allow Blender and its users to become even more efficient: getting 80% of the work done and spending most of the time on tweaking and refining would be a game changer.”

Another path would be “weaving Blender into game development and AR, Augmented Reality. Because, as much of an enthusiast as I am, I strongly believe VR is going to struggle […] I am not a technology Nostradamus – Apple is always a good sign of where the industry goes, because they’re never first but they always create an industry changing product. It is rumored that their AR glasses will replace the iPhone. It is going to take years, and Blender should be in a position to be ready for that. It would be very powerful to use Blender there to create assets, worlds… to create the environments,  experiences and apps.”

As the Blender project has been good at gathering people, it should “really invest in the outreach, get Blender into the mindset of anyone who has any kind of creative interest or ambition. [For example by going to] colleges and universities, where people are learning art and design, running competitions for people to create great art, working with platforms like IndieGogo or Kickstarter to encourage people to create [projects there], and also building relationships with movie studios or artistic colleges.” And because the work on documentation has already been strong, putting Blender into everybody’s hands should be a priority.

We ended our conversation exchanging about the future, the next fancy technological piece, and the new generation.

Looking back; how much technology has changed in 20 years, how it has shaped the world we live in, and how much this could all be turned upside down again in the next couple of decades.

At some point it came to my mind that, maybe, we haven’t been public enough about the efforts already put into preparing that transition. Since 2020, Ton has been implementing changes, new ways of organizing, to little by little take a step back and let another team run the project. Francesco Siddi has been at the forefront of this effort, taking on more responsibilities, officially, as he had already been Ton’s right hand for years. Although Ton isn’t ready to step down just yet, he is thinking about the future of Blender, its legacy, and doesn’t intend on leaving it to chance.

All in all, Jono Bacon has a very positive view of Blender, its development and future. As a CG enthusiast, first and foremost, I could sense that he is fond of the project, despite not following it closely anymore. Blender has played a meaningful part in Jono’s growth into an open-source connoisseur, with a free and endearing spirit he still recognizes to this day.

Nicolas Schmerkin is a French award-winning producer. Founder of the independent production company Autour de Minuit in 2001, he then created the animation studios ADV Studio (2011, Paris) and Borderline Films (2014, Angoulême). Known for impertinent, quirky and experimental movies, his company has produced around 100 short films, 5 series, 7 TV Specials and recently released its first feature film, Unicorn Wars – most of them using Blender, since its introduction in their pipeline in 2008.

I should mention right from the top that I worked at Autour de Minuit for four years and thus know Nicolas quite well – it is through working alongside him that I met open-source enthusiasts, discovered Blender and, well, ended up writing this article. Having seen first hand how much Blender contributes to the projects Autour de Minuit produces, it only made sense to dig into the history between the two.

It must have been 2007, when Autour de Minuit (ADM, for short) was still a small experimental lab for filmmakers. Mathieu Auvray, mostly known in the Blender community as the director of Cosmos Laundromat, is the first to mention Blender to Nicolas. He was then a champion of After Effects, the compositing tool of the Adobe suite, but he wanted to go into CG and was inspired by a short, Meischeid, directed by Chilly Gonzalez – where music and effects come together in a poetic way.

It’s not until 2009 that this interest for Blender turned into something tangible, on the pilot episode for Babioles: ”It was really a director’s choice, and he managed to convince other After Effects ‘bidouilleurs’ [DYIers who like to experiment] to join and give it a try”. Manu Rais, one of those new converts, then stayed and became the pipeline supervisor of the studio for almost 10 years, later joining Blender-based French studio TNZPV as their CTO. At the time though, Autour de Minuit may well have been the only studio in France to use the open-source software. “It was only beginners, we lacked skills in rigging, in animation, no one worked on Blender back then. We had to hire people who were not animation professionals, based all over France, who had learned Blender for fun.”

Still, for Nicolas this choice to try a new software didn’t really pose a question. As a non-technical person, he was mostly curious because of the experimental and explorative appeal. It was exciting to get out of the big business loop and, although it might be tempting to think of the open-source software as one less line in the budget, the logistics proved to be complicated: “Despite what it may seem, it wasn’t a money-driven decision, we had to train so many people on our own.”

What made the production company stick to Blender, then? As the projects added and the studio grew, the need for skilled professionals grew too. “After Babioles we did the first short-film for Jean-Michel, the first fully-made CG film in Blender, then a short called Francis, then the first projects around the platypus No-No. Still with Mathieu, still using Blender.” And in 2012, when the series for Babioles went into production, the Blender seed had grown into a bigger, fuller and more diverse community. Patience proved to be key! With small projects, shorts and small series, Autour de Minuit built its network of Blender people, which then evolved and grew as the projects grew bigger, until the 52 episodes of No-No, the series, were entirely made on Blender in 2017-2018. “We even managed to get our service provider for animation, TeamTo, to work on Blender”. Nicolas recalls feeling a great sense of pride back then, being the first ones to do so: convince a big studio to adopt their pipeline, and making all of this volume of animation 100% in Blender.

After a few years of hearing the name on a regular basis, Nicolas grew familiar with the Blender ecosystem and its founder. “I can remember meeting Ton and discussing render farms. At the time the Institute people were using some red Ikea metal drawers to host their farm, so we did the same, built it ourselves too. With Blender we even found inspiration for the hardware!” he jokes. Though, from the start, Mathieu had brought a plethora of information with the DVDs and manuals. Also, Ton’s idea of using the production of short films to develop specific features had already been noticed by the team at ADM. This was unique and inspiring.

When I talked with Nicolas, what stood out to me was how much this was a story about people, again. As a producer, technology is one tool, it could be many other ways. However with Blender it led the ADM founder to meet key people he’s kept close with for many years, people who shaped the studio as much as Blender shaped their view of the animation industry.

On the critically-acclaimed short Peripheria, Christophe Seux joined the team and filled a key position that they had been struggling with: rigging. As it turned out, in 2014 there were only a couple of people in France who could call themselves competent Blender riggers. A collaboration that proved fruitful in more than one way: for the No-No series, Christophe did all the setups for the characters but then had to leave for another project – no negative feedback came from TeamTo, which animated all 52 episodes of 7 min each – more than six hours of animation without an issue on the rig (or at least, functional enough for the teams to deliver), a rarity in the industry; years later, the same Christophe created the cornerstone tool to transform Unicorn Wars into a fully 2D-looking film. Today he is still one of the key supervisors and developers at ADM, while participating in other productions. He would hate me for saying this, but he is one of the most well-known Blender technicians in France, having worked on multiple features, shaping entire pipelines with his expertise and specific eye for pipeline design. I have been around enough studios to know it’s not far from the truth, at all.

Because Blender was part of the Autour de Minuit DNA, people stuck around, people who had a taste for experimental or odd projects, people who had the desire to be part of this gigantic community of developers and artists. Because Blender is lighter on the ADM pipeline, some short films were made possible thanks to it. Projects that then gave voice to international artists and directors, from countries where there is less money for cinema – like Argentina, Chile or Czech Republic. Another story about people, the opportunities Blender created, and, dare I say, the Freedom to Create. At least, that’s what I see from my corner of the narrative.

I’m pretty sure that Nicolas Schmerkin, as strong-minded as he can be seen on the producing scene, would have done many of the projects he did with or without Blender. He is tenacious. However, having the right tool put a lot of grease in the gears of his studios, and it also allowed him to distinguish himself furthermore and sharpen his tongue. In 2014, he recalls “starting to raise my voice at the animation schools during a conference, to push them to teach Blender. I became an advocate for Blender, unintendedly.” Almost a political posture, in a conservative industry. People were surprised that such a software could be used professionally, and even though they were starting to recognize the open-source name, no training really existed: “the CNC [French Center for the Cinema] didn’t listen back then”. When Adobe and likes started to raise their fees and change to a monthly-subscription model, more studios started to listen though. But it took years for schools to start incorporating Blender into their curriculum, and it is still a work in progress. “The only issue I can recall, really, is when others [studios, people] don’t want to work on [Blender]. When you’re splitting the work, for instance.” There’s also the obvious issue of the software not being production-ready or the projects straining its possibilities, like on Peripheria: “We had to work on Photoshop because Grease Pencil wasn’t even an alternative yet.” The team may remember the project as a very hard one to make, although the producer adds “I’ve almost never heard people doing one project with it and complaining afterwards; rather the opposite.”

Working in an industry always looking for innovation although often reluctant to alternative models, what has been Blender’s impact on cinema? “Blender is made for the users, by the users and yes, it had a real impact on independent cinema: I Lost my Body [directed by Jérémy Clapin, winner of the Annecy Cristal, two Césars and going all the way to the Academy Awards], Flow [directed by Gints Zilbalodis, currently in production], they were all possible thanks to Blender. It opens the door to experimental cinema, and it may even allow the junction from short to feature film.” Not just that, but I know first-hand how high Nicolas’ expectations are: “With ADM we’ve always ambitioned to make beautiful images, even for kids’ shows. Blender allowed us to do it, for a lesser cost.” In that sense, studios using Blender both pushed for a more mature cinema, as well as tried to elevate the artistic ambitions of a genre too often abandoned (cartoons for kids).

Today, Nicolas wishes we wouldn’t see studios using Blender as revolutionary. For many years now, the software has shown it can handle producing high-quality content. “One thing remains to be seen though; could Blender handle a big 2D series? With puppet rigs? There’s a big push to do in that direction, so that it can get to the same level as its 3D side and other 2D softwares”. A wish that should be fulfilled in the next couple of years as the Grease Pencil tool is getting a makeover, with first a full rewrite to make it ready for the array of features 2D artists have been dreaming of.

What about further away in the future? “The AI thing can be scary, even polarizing in the industry. We already see that in the grant application process, in the committees.” The French producer doesn’t really believe AI would be a good direction, and neither the AR/VR one: “Only a few projects use that, however the real time side would be interesting.” Nicolas confesses again that he is not the best placed person to talk about the technical side of Blender. “Above all, I wish it remains independent, and that the Blender Studio keeps on producing movies. Maybe also, I don’t know if that already exists, to have more official means of sharing the development updates from the different studios [using Blender].” And, as my former colleague Mario Hawat proclaimed in our talk during the BCON23, the ‘Holy Grail’: everything in Blender. “One software can really do it all. We need to fill the gaps and improve what still isn’t optimal. Editing the film, pre-editing the sound?”

It was quite interesting to dig into that side of Nicolas’ memory and vision. Over the years, I became more and more interested in Blender, working on building innovative pipelines and defining new tools; the endless possibilities were mesmerizing. Through this interview, I understood something I didn’t before: Nicolas’ seemingly lack of interest in the technical side of the projects, the lack of investment sometimes, had been disappointing for me. I now realize I may not have been there when Autour de Minuit invested the most into Blender. Maybe it wasn’t what I had in mind, however it is thanks to producers like Schmerkin that directors and artists alike can take a chance on a new tool, experiment, try, fail, create their own challenge. You need a bit of distance from the details to agree to such a crazy and scary gamble. To dive into a process that no one has done before. To pitch and promise movies to the world, when you don’t even know how you’ll make them come to life, yet.

It takes passionate and stubborn people to believe that technology and art will align, that the right people will come along to make it all take shape. In a sense, this is where Blender and independent cinema share a striking resemblance: people truly shape the project.

Does Dr. Jon Peddie need any introduction? In our industry, at large, his reports have accompanied hundreds of companies and, with over 35 years of working in the business, he has given his consultancy to many CEOs and CTOs. His website presents him as a recognized pioneer in the graphics industry, president of Jon Peddie Research, and named one of the world’s most influential analysts. When Ton contacted him to offer the interview, Jon responded with much enthusiasm and even started digging into his memory of their relationship. Indeed, the two men have known each other for more than 20 years now, meeting at conferences over the years, often gathering over dinner – “Ton knows his food and wine!” – after meeting during the Not A Number years. A strong bond connects Jon and Ton, as they share the same appreciation for honesty, directness, and, you got it, a good meal.

With his wide knowledge of the international market, spanning hardware and software evolutions for decades, what does Jon Peddie see in Blender? “Blender was fully functional in 2000, it only got bigger and better”, he explains. “Ton’s vision was to design a universal pipeline for 3D animation, in the nineties, to make movies.” Nothing like it existed then, studios were juggling with different softwares, if any. Ton’s ambition was to streamline the processes to put the creators back at the center of the experience: here we can already hear the premises of today’s core value, The Freedom to Create.

When the internet bubble popped and Ton’s first venture, Not A Number ended, Ton reflected on his experience so far: “since he had been dealing with struggling entrepreneurs and artists, he knew that there was a population there – that’s when the open-source idea came”. Jon recalls the night that his developer friend told him that, during a nice dinner: “It was like a switch went off. He went from mildly depressed to enthusiastic, with his face lit up”. Jon’s first thought? “Don’t do it!” He couldn’t imagine anyone making a living out of this, “selling manuals”, and was worried about his friend. He could see that, while many people working on open-source projects were doing it on top of their day job, Ton was going to go all in and make it his primary activity: “He was gonna live or die on this. I’m thinking, you know, he’s not fat to begin with, he doesn’t have a lot of weight to lose without eating!” . However, Ton’s vision proved him right, finding like-minded people to build the project and ways to have a line of income: “he actually managed to support himself selling manuals, as he thought!” Regarding Ton himself, “he’s self-actualized, he genuinely is [because] he has realized his dream!”

As history will have it, Blender managed to deliver on its core goal:

“Blender’s biggest achievement is to have given the industry the first functioning linear tool.” Although, as Jon Peddie recalls it, the open movies might be the project Ton is most proud of: when the first open movie came out,  “if [Ton] could have floated he would have.”

How relevant is Blender today, according to the experienced analyst? “It’s a vehicle”, with so many bright people working on it. With communities working together, like when computers got started: “you would gather and share, show each other’s code [so it taps] into the DNA / spirit of the field.” Like a Volkswagen, it is “a tool for everybody, and anybody” – plus “it’s got too many bright people working on it.[…] I would say that probably every studio in the world is using it – not necessarily 24/7, but for something, for a tiny part even.” That is if you consider only the movies, which Blender is not even restricted to! In 2010, Jon recalls asking the Pixar or Dreamworks team (he can’t remember precisely) if they were using Blender, or considering it: “they said very cautiously, wondering if they were going on record and I was going to write an exposé on it, ‘uh we’re looking at it, it’s – interesting’. So I wrote a note to Ton saying that this big studio was gonna use Blender – and Ton already knew!”. Even when people couldn’t believe that Blender was as good as others said it was, the project gained more users and contributors. “It was really a grass root growth.” The community at work, again.

Nowadays, Jon Peddie sees Blender as “a full member of the open-source world”, and, in the CG world at large, Blender is “no longer a curiosity or a question – it’s almost a standard”. While it is now firmly installed in the landscape, it still carries its singularity: “Blender brings a robust set of tools, functions and libraries, as well as a user interface that developers understand and quickly relate to.” A strength that the analyst clearly attributes to the open-source nature of the project: “it is made by the people who use it. And it will perpetuate because they want to use it – they’ll keep it alive.” Blender managed to grow and get robust, while staying relevant for the users and interesting enough for developers to remain invested.

When asked about the doubts expressed by his long-time friend Ton, Jon was quick to respond: “It’s his cross to bear, he’s doing that to himself!”. Ton’s impression that Blender can be seen as not accessible, or apart from the global open-source movement is not well-founded: “If you do a survey of the industry, you’ll find out that they don’t share that view. But let him have that! Keep him hungry!”. As the founder and leader, Ton both has a very specific point of view on Blender’s place – maybe even skewed – as well as an obvious responsibility in it. So keeping him on his toes, always, is another way of getting the project to move forward, asking the hard questions and improving.

We then talked about the project’s relationship to big corporations, subject to criticism in the past: “Every organization needs patrons”, and yes, often one or more of the ´’Big Five’ get involved. “Since there’s no advertising involved or attempt at ownership of the final product, if those companies and organizations feel generous – and it is generosity, not charity – then yes, I think you should accept it. I don’t think it diminishes the open-source-ness, reputation or objectivity of Blender.” The broad picture is nuanced though, as Blender has patrons in various corners of the industry, as well as many private individuals contributing. And, as it’s always been said and enforced, the project keeps its independence, So, we could look at other entities to work with, and we are – Jon Peddie encourages the project to broaden the scope furthermore: “The analyst in me, I would start identifying the industries that benefit from using Blender – look at who uses content-creation software in other, in every industry?” Jon wouldn’t go into specific recommendations though, as he says “anytime I’ve done that ,Ton says ‘yeah I know, I’ve already talked to them’ – He’s always two steps ahead of me!”

As we start the project’s journey into the next 20 years, Jon believes that “Blender will still carry on – it does need a leader with a vision otherwise the direction will wander, to whatever the current crisis is in content creation”, influenced by the outside. As many people in the industry, he senses that the next step has to do with AI. “Tell the computer to do [things], to do what you want. [..] Work on an AI interface.” Isn’t Jon Peddie afraid of the effects of AI on the quality of projects, or on the people working on them? “Now, everybody’s a creator. It will all come down to, not the mechanics of Blender, but the quality of your story.” He sees this next step as a natural progression, one similar to others before: if you divide people between the technical ones and the artistic ones, even if you give more technical means into the hands of the artists, they’ll still reach “the limits of [their] own use. [Blender users] will still get to a point where they’re not quite getting what they want, which is when you reach a tipping point; they’ll still want to see what’s behind the curtain. Maybe you don’t become a coder, but a tweaker.” In other words, like other technical innovations, AI will put more possibilities into the hands of more people; it will give more direct access and power over tools and results many couldn’t reach before. Still, it will have a limit, and other people will still have a purpose in helping cross that new boundary.

For Blender’s organization itself, Jon recommends we hire a person for… data analysis. “Look at the communication’s traffic […] are we at a steady state, or are we falling off somewhere?” Do some auditing: quality control, keep an eye on the global and the details so that we can fix things when they slip or pinpoint what people don’t use – a more difficult thing to track, in contrast to bug report. As he remembers, “Ton is always thinking about how to make Blender better.” I gather that a person dedicated to gathering intelligence and helping turn those info into actionable items would ensure that this spirit endures. With time, Blender could become one of those open-source projects that rallies (almost) everyone into building industry-standard tools. A common basis for more innovation, like Khronos: “they make Vulkan, an API software that allows communication with the hardware. They are an open-source organization as well, they invited various companies trying to build software drivers to come together and build an API that [they] would want to use, efficient. It took a lot of diplomacy, and it worked” which allowed the mobile phone manufacturers to align on important things and then the market to skyrocket.

Participate in change, rally organizations, keep a close eye on the quality: can Blender lead tomorrow’s innovation?

About the author

Jim Thacker edits the technology news website CG Channel. He was previously editor of 3D World magazine, has worked on books from Focal Press and Design Studio Press, and has been a technical writer for a lot of CG software developers, including, on occasion, the Blender Institute itself.

My career as a visual effects journalist coincides almost exactly with Blender’s existence as an open-source application. As the new editor of the newsstand magazine 3D World, one of the first stories I ever commissioned was on the original Free Blender crowdfunding campaign, followed a few years later by a series of production diaries from the set of the first Blender open movie.

Later, as the editor of the technology news website CG Channel, I covered subsequent, more ambitious attempts at open movie-making, the industry’s own shift towards open-source technology and, eventually, Blender’s use in the production of Oscar and Emmy Award-winning films.

The next paragraphs represent my pick of the milestones in Blender’s movie history: the key steps (and occasionally, missteps) along its path from initial release to industry staple. It isn’t a definitive history, but I hope that it gives an idea of how the software was seen by outsiders: not the diehard open-source advocates, but those engaged in the day-to-day business of making movies.

If anything, the need for open-source 3D software was even greater in 2002, when Blender was first released under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence, than it is today. This was a period when the main applications used in visual effects and feature animation cost thousands – in some cases, tens of thousands – of dollars, leading many students and freelance artists to resort to cracked software, while some studios were still using IRIX-based SGI Octane workstations in production. (As the decade wore on, most would be recommissioned as display cabinets or beer fridges, while their rendering duties were taken over by much less expensive Linux boxes.)

Yet the open-source apps bulking out the cover discs of contemporary computer graphics magazines were, by and large, an unprepossessing bunch: programmers’ pet projects, or hobbyist tools intended for teenagers looking to mod video games. Two things separated Blender from the pack. 

Firstly, ambition: even before the first open-source release, Ton had established the non-profit Blender Foundation, meaning that right from the start, Blender was developed not by a loose-knit community of bedroom coders, but through an organization akin to a commercial software developer. And secondly, the size and dedication of its user base: long before Kickstarter, at a time when just buying things online was still a novelty, the Free Blender crowdfunding campaign was able to raise the €110,000 needed to buy the source code back from investors in Ton’s previous company, Not a Number. There was still a long road ahead of it, but Blender was on its way.

Another thing that distinguished Blender from most other early open-source graphics tools was Ton’s insistence that it should be possible to use the software in production – or at least, under conditions similar to those of a commercial production. And so, in 2005, work began on Elephants Dream, the first Blender open movie.

‘Movie’ is an ambitious description for what is actually a nine-minute animated short, completed at a fraction of the cost of a typical Pixar production. But the €120,000 budget – raised through pre-orders of DVDs and a grant from the Netherlands Media Art Institute – meant that Elephants Dream had a price-per-frame in the same ballpark as indie animated features of the time.

More importantly, the new render pipeline created during its production became part of the public release of Blender: a pattern of developing by doing that became formalized in 2007 with the foundation of the Blender Institute to oversee the production of future open movies.

As a promotional tool, Elephants Dream was something of a mixed blessing: dark, semi-abstract, and adult in a way that most English-language animations of the time were not. But its successor, 2008’s Big Buck Bunny, was a viral hit, channeling an underlying streak of cartoon sadism into a more familiar Looney Tunes format.

Its cast of cute (ish) woodland critters – released, like all of the other assets from the short, under a Creative Commons licence – proved irresistible to marketers, with images from the movie popping up in everything from pamphlets for the Boy Scouts of America to ads for Google phones. Awareness of Blender began to spread outside the open-source community.

Between 2003 and 2011, there were 33 major public releases of Blender: a development schedule on a par with commercial applications. The frequency and regularity of the updates reassured potential users that the software wasn’t about to disappear overnight – not always a certainty with open-source projects – but while professional artists would have regarded the new features as “good”, many would have qualified that assessment with the caveat, “for free software”.

That changed at the end of 2011 with the release of Blender 2.61. Cycles, the new render engine that it introduced, was a production-capable ray tracer before ray tracing was common in movie production: at the time, Arnold was best known as Sony Pictures Imageworks’ in-house software, while V-Ray was still largely an architectural renderer.

The following year, open movie Tears of Steel brought new camera tracking, compositing and grading tools – things that commercial visual effects applications tended to throw in as afterthoughts – and by the time Grease Pencil 2.0 was introduced later in the decade, it was clear that Blender was beginning to do things that no other 3D application could.

Meanwhile, major studios were taking their first steps towards open-source, albeit in the form of pipeline technologies like OpenEXR and Alembic: the idea of open-sourcing an entire in-house tool, as DreamWorks would later do with its MoonRay renderer, was still unthinkable.

As they did so, Blender began to move in from the margins. At the start of the decade, its largest users were firms in Asia and South America, some of which had switched over from cracked copies of commercial software; by 2014 it was being used on the Oscar-nominated Song of the Sea. 

The following year, Pixar revealed that Blender was one of the third-party 3D applications that the studio supported for use internally, and the software finally had Hollywood’s seal of approval.

But in the second half of the decade, it often seemed that the goal of the Blender Institute was not to seduce Hollywood, but to set up in opposition to it. In 2014, the Institute announced Project Gooseberry, a crowdfunded feature-length animation, to be produced by a network of decidedly non-California-based studios, including the Oscar-winning Autour de Minuit.

While crowdfunding had worked for Blender itself, it failed to scale to movie production, with the project securing just under €300,000 of its initial €500,000 target: not far off the record for a crowdfunded animation at the time, but a long way short of the €3.5 million needed to complete the film, and orders of magnitude less than a typical Pixar or Disney feature.

Project Gooseberry was eventually scaled back to a short, the surreal Cosmos Laundromat: First Cycle, and went on to win several major animation awards, plus a nomination for a Webby Award, almost certainly making it the first short film about a suicidal sheep to be shortlisted.

The Institute had a second try with the more conventionally commercial Agent 327: Operation Barbershop, an adaptation of the Dutch comic series, produced as a teaser for a full-length animated feature. But while the trailer, directed by former Pixar artist Colin Levy, was well-received on its release in 2017 (this time, it actually won a Webby), the movie itself has yet to materialize.

However, not all of the work was in vain: the Blender Development Fund, Blender’s crowdfunding platform – introduced in 2011 and relaunched in its current form in 2018 – was to play a crucial role in the next chapter in Blender’s story.

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, Blender’s interface and workflow had been stubbornly, even defiantly, different to that of other 3D applications. ‘Just because everyone else does it, that doesn’t mean it’s right,’ seemed to be the prevailing opinion in the development team. 

That’s undoubtedly true, but for software to be adopted on large projects, studios need to be able to call on enough freelance artists to get them through crunch periods, and the way that Blender did things deterred many freelancers from making the switch from commercial tools. (The convention that you right-clicked rather than left-clicked to select things was a particular turn-off.)

But in 2019, following an unprecedented two years of development, that finally changed, with what was to become the most significant update in Blender history since the original open-source release.

Not only did Blender 2.80 standardize Blender’s interface and dispense with the default right-click, but it introduced Eevee: to this day, a more capable viewport renderer than those in most 3D applications, and a real unique selling point at the time. The images that early users, like Lucasfilm concept artist Jama Jurabaev and Daniel Bystedt, then Head of Modeling at Goodbye Kansas Studios, produced with it would prove invaluable in building a buzz ahead of Blender 2.80’s release.

Under the hood, the update overhauled the dependency graph, improving performance on large scenes, and introduced the Collections system, making it easier to manage assets in production. Suddenly, Blender began to look like a viable proposition not just for teams of 20, but of 200.

Outside the core software, there was a growing ecosystem of third-party add-ons, available through sites like Blender Market. Plugins have been key to the success of many professional applications, expanding popular toolsets in more focused ways, and some of those add-ons, particularly hard-surface modeling tools like Boxcutter and HardOps, proved to be a major draw to new converts.

Blender also benefited indirectly from the massive success of Fortnite, some of the profits from which Epic Games redistributed to the industry through its MegaGrants program. The $1.2 million it donated to the Blender Development Fund over a three-year period convinced other tech giants to do likewise – Amazon, AMD, Apple, Google, Intel, Meta, Microsoft and NVIDIA have all contributed to the fund – funding a rapid expansion of Blender’s development team.

Convinced by the positive PR, major studios began switching to Blender, with both Ubisoft Animation Studio and anime powerhouse Khara, Inc. announcing that they were adopting the software as their primary production tool.

By end of the year, even skeptics knew that the Blender of the 2020s would be a very different beast to the Blender of the 2000s, or even the 2010s, and as smaller commercial tools faltered, switching to open-source became not just a viable strategy for freelancers, but a career survival strategy.

The problem with extraordinary growth is that people expect it to continue, long after they have forgotten that it is extraordinary. While enthusiasts might have hoped that by now, Blender would dominate movie production, the past three years have been more about consolidation than conquest.

While the software remains widely used for asset development, its adoption in other parts of production pipelines has been slower, with the long-awaited overhaul of the character animation tools now scheduled for completion in 2025.

And in 2021, Blender lost one of its highest-profile users, the Emmy Award-winning Tangent Animation, prompting an acrimonious online debate about whether the studio’s closure was the result of its Blender-based pipeline, or its subsequent decision to abandon it. (For what it’s worth, it was probably neither.)

Nevertheless, Blender continues to be used on high-profile projects like Netflix’s Love, Death & Robots and Amazon Prime Video’s Undone, while the Blender Development Fund receives over €130,000 each month, helping to pay the salaries of over 25 full-time developers. 

The software even has a grown-up new release schedule, having recently moved to a two-year cycle with regular long-term support releases. As the recent decision (thankfully quickly reversed) to break with the VFX Reference Platform reflects, it doesn’t always do what visual effects facilities expect, but then, it probably never will: Blender is an application whose development is dictated by the needs of millions of individual users, not a handful of large studios.

As it hits 20 as an open-source application, Blender is no longer a precocious child or a rebellious teen, but it’s a long way from sinking into middle-aged conformity. The software has taken on adult responsibilities without losing the youthful desire to shake up the established order that has taken it from the hobbyist community to the very heart of the movie industry. Here’s to another 20 years of rule-breaking.

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

Today the Blender Foundation releases the first episode of Blenderheads, a series about the people behind the Blender project. The editor and director –documentary maker Maaike Kleverlaan– works embedded in the Blender headquarters to cover the activities and conduct interviews. The first episode is set during September-December 2022, with new episodes being published on a quarterly basis.

Blenderheads follows the journey of people involved in the Blender project, documenting the process of creating the best free and open source 3D content creation software. This goes beyond software design and development, and focuses on life as part of the Blender community.

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.

2022 is a big year for Blender, celebrating 20 years of being Open Source and the return to big events to connect with the community and the industry.

13-18th June – Annecy, France

The first large event of the year with Blender presence will be the Annecy Festival. Just like in 2018, Blender will have its own booth at MIFA (14-17th June).

Part of the Blender Studio team will be present as this will be the first time an Open Movie project (Sprite Fright) gets nominated for the Annecy International Animation Film Festival (FIFA)! 

Moreover, students of the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional created an alternate score of the open movie Spring. Interpreted by an orchestra during the festival on the 16th (Thursday), at 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. at Cine Concert, Annecy Castle Museum.

Annecy is a great opportunity to connect with studios and individual artists. In 2018, a large crowd gathered to see the Grease Pencil demos by Daniel Martinez Lara, way before the improvements in 2.80. This year Daniel will join the team once again to demo the Storyboarding workflow. A meetup with Blender professionals will be organized, stay tuned for more info on social media.

We can’t wait to see what people are creating with Blender nowadays! 

Learn more about the Annecy Festival on their website.

8-11th August – Vancouver, Canada

The largest conference for computer graphics is back, and Blender will once again be part of it as it has since 1999.

This will be the first SIGGRAPH since the iconic release of Blender 2.80, and the team is preparing a bigger booth for the community and industry to come, network, or simply hangout. Find us at booth #833.

Learn more about SIGGRAPH on their website. Get a special discount when you register by using the code SBF22.

27-29th October – Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Closing the year with a bang, the Blender event is back and bigger than ever.

Taking place at the beautiful 18th century neo-classical Felix Meritis in the heart of Amsterdam, BCON22 will host the largest amount of visitors ever.

Tickets sale will start at the end of June, as well as a call for talks, and Suzanne Awards Festival submissions.

Follow @BlenderConf for the latest updates.