Dalai Felinto:
Blender from the beginning, had its close connection with arches and creators. And that was a big question. How do we do this in a decentralized manner? How do we make sure the software doesn't go in every single direction? And then it goes no direction at all.

Eric Anderson:
This is contributor. A podcast, telling the stories behind the best open source projects and the communities that make them. I'm Eric Anderson. Today, we get to talk about blender, one of the oldest and strongest open source projects I've come across, and to speak about blender, we have with us Dalai, who leads some of the development efforts, has been a long time community member and is really the best person to talk to us about the blender project. Thanks for coming to Dalai.

Dalai Felinto:
My pleasure. Thanks for the invitation, Eric. Thanks everyone for your attention.

Eric Anderson:
So let's get it out of the way and help everyone understand, for the uninitiated, what blender is.

Dalai Felinto:
Blender is a creative tool set. We call it DCC, digital content creation tool. Basically a tool to allow you to make animations like pixel like animations, but relying entirely on the open source pipeline. So it works for games. If you want to make assets for games, it works for movies, animations, scientific visualization, architecture visualization, art, you name it.

Eric Anderson:
So quarter bender is probably 3d, right? It's a kind of a 3d rendering.

Dalai Felinto:
Yes, 3d nowadays. It has a lot of 2d functionality as well. You see people using it for 2d. I don't know if you seen less ear in the Oscar nominees for it was in the, I think international films or animations. I don't remember. We had the, I lost my body, which was a feature film totally made in blender using ratoscopy, using some of the 2d tools in blender. And I would see more and more studios using blender for their storyboard pipeline and even for mixing 2d and 3d. So though blender started as a 3d software, it's also opening up some opportunities for people working 2D.

Eric Anderson:
And we should ground this introduction in timeline because blender is not new, right?

Dalai Felinto:
Blender is quite old and blender is an open source project is bit younger than blender itself, but still old enough. I have the numbers here because I didn't want to forget. So blender official release, the first one is from 1994, January 2nd, 1994. That's 27 years ago. And blender became open source in 98, 4 years after that. And so much change since. I personally been using blender since 2014, when I did a first course, I knew it before and it start and I contribute to blender for more than 11 or 12 years, I think.

Eric Anderson:
So we'll come back to the product some more when we get to it, but let's pick up at the beginning. How familiar, Dalai, are you with the origin stories of blender?

Dalai Felinto:
I'm familiar enough that I've grew to be a fan of blender before getting to work to blender. And that's something that blender has his meat those days. It's a really nice backstory that actually think helps to shape the community in a way, builds us a narrative. If the software wasn't good enough, that would mean nothing. But since it is, it's a nice story to tell. So blender was started as a small Dutch software, not even in Amsterdam, if I'm not mistaken. And at the time was one of the field softwares for 3d that could work, could run in Mac, in Linux, in windows. At the time, I don't remember, I think Silicon graphic and it started because Ton Roosendaal, chairman of the blender foundation, my boss, he wanted to create, he's someone who was very creative. So that was when he was around, honestly, around my age, which quite scary was like 30 something.

Dalai Felinto:
And then he decided to have a small admission studio and then they bought a Silicon graphic. It was really big and expensive computer at the time, but they didn't have the money to buy the software to create with the computer. So he started developing blender himself. He studied graphic design or industrial design. So he always had an eye for usability, for aesthetics, and he is a self taught engineer programmer. And he started to develop a software for himself so they could provide service for the local business here and decided to release it for free with an optional paid version of the software. So basically it could go and download and use most of its functionalities. There was a special key on the keyboard, which was only available if you had the paid version of the app, blender. You could do more advanced things.

Dalai Felinto:
And that's how blender started to get a community and things were going well. This back when internet was quite new and everyone was investing on it. At the time, blender, new geo, which was the company behind the blender was not a number. New geo and then went open source. So at the time the company, they even had to deal with Sony to be able to deploy PlayStation one games within blender, which was really neat. There's this one CD running around every other year we find it again, that can actually have a PlayStation one game, which was entirely created within the blender game engine and blender. But blender had this interact mold within itself. Blender at the time had like an office, I think Japan and in the states, New York, maybe. Mostly for legal and able to represent the brand there. And everything was really growing.

Dalai Felinto:
And then the whole internet crashed. The whole boom of the internet startups, verbal burst. And basically at that time, blender was a property of a company who was already having open to the stock market. So they only had 49% percent of their own value. So putting simple terms, stone had only have 50% minus one ownership of the company, which on one hand is pretty interesting to know if you, it should get me 10 months, just a very down to earth guy. He's the one that buying bread to the studio every day, every Tuesday, he does some egg specials out, match out measures is a Dutch thing. And yet he at the time had, I don't know, three, four, 7 million Euro in stock, something like this. Which like 30 something years old is a bit crazy. But from overnight, that meant nothing because the company was didn't mean a thing.

Dalai Felinto:
It was not worth a penny. And of course, for the people owning the rise of the software in the company, basically it did not make sense to continue developing blender. For them was just money that sank. They didn't want to run into the sunken cost fallacy. You know what, that shelf is one day we can revisit that. And there was a lot of people that already were depending on blender for their livings, way less in nowadays, but still people that grew fond of it, what it can do. And then it got to the point where Ton decided to make an online, basically online crowdfunding that's 1998. So that before Kickstarter, GoFundMe me, you name it. And he expected this to last around two years. So he thought, you know what? I did enough. I deserve a bit of a rest, then have two years to rest and we can set up this foundation, see if it works. Let's try to get a community to buy blender back from the company.

Dalai Felinto:
So he made a boat offer to the company, which was a hundred thousand euros at the time. And it was really, I don't like to say, is kind of a number that is like, that's not too high, that would be possible to get from the people. It's not too low that it would mean nothing to the investors. And there's some stories in between that. I hope one day Ton writes his memoir because he really had to find out who were the founders behind the money because they were some very private, elite people.

Dalai Felinto:
And he managed to find them and then he made an open letter in the blender website, a minute of an expose saying, Hey, would like to get ahold of the software again, Mr. And miss blah, blah, blah. And the moment that went live, the day after he got a call from the agent, saying, let's talk, please remove that from the website. And basically what he expected to do in two years, he managed doing in six weeks. So to this day, if you go to the blender.org about page, you can see people who were original founders of the blender license. And then it all started, then had a foundation and everything else.

Eric Anderson:
That is quite a story. So maybe just to recap, some of that, out of necessity, financial necessity, Ton develops the code base himself, to begin with. Eventually the internet boom gives them an opportunity to bring on investors. They commercialize the effort and then the bubble burst, value is zero. And in order to rescue the demise of blender, Ton makes a case to buy blender back and figures out who's the real decision maker here and is able to apply pressure in the right places in order to make it happen. So ton then buys back blender for a hundred K presumably?

Dalai Felinto:
Yeah. The community does.

Eric Anderson:
The community does. Yeah. Oh, right, right. They raised the funds. So now the community owns the project to a degree?

Dalai Felinto:
Yeah. So that's 2002. So in 1994, blender started initially as an in-house software, 1998 blender went public for people to use it online and buy it. And then that's four years later, 2002, equal open source. So how do you manage a software which was developed in-house in a closed contact with artist? How do you then open up and make it open source? Because we see a lot of open source projects that start as community projects from day one or the brainchild of one, two developers, but blender from the beginning, had its close connection with artists and creators. That's something to this day, we still pride ourselves a lot. And that was a big question. How do we do this in a decentralized manner? How do we make sure the software doesn't go in every single direction? And then it goes no direction at all.

Dalai Felinto:
And to do that, we have the start of the open movie projects. Maybe we've seen some of them. Big buck bunny is a very famous one because it was used for, I think LG TVs and every other electronic device you can think of. It started as this idea of having artists coming over, people that were already familiar with the software, coming over to Amsterdam for a few months, have a few developers flying over as well. So people that were contributing remotely, come here have also a crowd funding to make sure this is possible. So selling DVDs at that time was mostly DVDs, imagine that. So blender had to go through a few of those transitions, right? And then allowing this to be focus. So the first open movie was, elephants dream. To this day, the movies on MoMA in New York as a piece of art history.

Dalai Felinto:
And with the movie, for instance, we got composed for nodes in blender. So composing means you do your whole art within your 3d software. And then you want to fix up a little bit, the colors you want to adjust to put some blur to change the background. And this is something that's very usual nowadays to have, but then blender didn't have, just as an an example. So Ton says, what is the minimum things we need to make a nice short movie and let's make sure we make that public so developers can help us within that agenda. And that worked quite well. So I really like elephant dream. It's a bit artsy project. The story a little bit very strange, but it was, it proved as a success in terms of fundraising, in terms of development model for blender.

Dalai Felinto:
And then after that there was big buck money, which was a huge success in terms of creating open content. Because open source is not only important for artists that have a studio that want to have a chance to be in the 3d industry, it's also important for the whole world. If you are again, developing a new technology to study stereoscopic, what kind of content you can have which can be a ground truth that you can compare with different publications. If you're creating a new hardware, a new TV, name it. It's nice to have those flashy high saturated, bright content that is free for everyone to use.

Eric Anderson:
So, Dalai, maybe just to make sure I understand that. So blender for a long time has been open source in terms of the tool. And you're saying that an individual project becomes open source to a degree. This is the open content. Anybody can watch a movie, but you're saying I can see how each frame was developed. The wire frames, the meshes, the textures.

Dalai Felinto:
You can open every single fire of the movie that was made to render out and then rerender it, tweak it, learn from it. So it's an interesting approach for learning that I've seen throughout the years, we've done. You can have more structured learning where you have a methodology and you teach the best way to learn whatever craft. But there's the other way, which is just to show, if you take top talent artists and just let them show, let them share how they work, doesn't mean the best way to work, doesn't mean the solution that fits everyone, but it's a very open and transparent creative process. So to this day, like every day here, what we do, we are now about finish a Sprite fried movie project. It's coming out by the time this podcast is out, it's going to be out already for a few days.

Dalai Felinto:
So go check it out. And not only the movie content is available and online, no longer with DVDs, but the cloud. People can download and get all the files, but they also have every step of the way, that every cut that we publish every week, every working progress image of the artist, has all been shared as part of providing tools and the ways for 3d artists to be in the 3d market. So only the 3d software sometimes is not enough. We need to try to burst a little bit that bubble. It's an interesting dynamic we have, if this, the art and the development. So to this date, it evolved over the years. But to this days, something that makes blender, blender, for sure.

Eric Anderson:
One more question on the art, Dalai. So who's kind of funding, who's the creative. So somebody decides, I want to make a movie and I'll make it with the blender foundation and they're going to help fund it, and I'll make the content open source in the end. So how does that work? Or what is that exactly?

Dalai Felinto:
This doesn't exist because on one hand blender, the blender Institute, there's a blender foundation, blender Institute, blender studio, I won't bother you with the details, but let's say the blender mission is not to take over the industry, is not to replace Hollywood. It also doesn't want to do unfair competition with content creators. So there is someone that can teach blender and they encourage, and they should really do it. Not a blender foundation that's going to be monopolizing teaching blender. It's a made for move making. There's plenty of movies being made with blender every day, feature films, short films.

Dalai Felinto:
There's a movie that's coming out late October, may end three, the Netflix by Jorge Gutierrez, the director of book of life and is basically, is a six episode series, short series, with 30 minutes each, which is entirely made with blender and little bit of, I think, after effects, but mostly blender. So those companies are using blender and they're encouraged to be autonomous. And when possible to contribute back. What we have centralized here is short productions, tech demos to make sure blender can still be validated in a production environment. Make sure we're not developing blender in the vacuum. So this movie I'm talking about, this Sprite fright, the pitch is basically smurfs meets gremlins.

Dalai Felinto:
Most of the artists are in house. We have to outsource some of the animators, but the director is someone from outside that came in only for that project. He's someone who worked as an animator in toy story one, worked as part of the story for toy story two, working in Simpsons as animator. So a great guy. Worked for a few years at Pixar. Glen is the one going out to try to reach to those talents, to try to raise the bar here. But every other move out there just encouraged to be autonomous and have a bit soft doing, supporting blender, and then doing their own projects with blender. I'm looking now at the blender, that fund page, just to get the fresh look at the names, have active vision. That's how we got that soft, right? Microsoft, Adobe, Nvideo, epic, Amazon, unity, Facebook, AMD, Google, Microsoft. It's not for blender to help Hollywood, but it's for like would expect people that depend on blender to see a point of helping funding the project and being part of this. Contributing to the buck, fixing report bugs, polishing it developed.

Eric Anderson:
So, Dalai, that's an amazing history. Talk us now about the community and how it's evolved. And weave your story in there. I imagine at some point, you kind of discovered blender, joined a community, and then became kind of an employee and had a role. So, yeah. How does the community kind of operate? How has it evolved over time and insert yourself in there?

Dalai Felinto:
It's an interesting thing to see a product like blender from inside, because it changed so much and is still changing a lot. And I know that from outside, people maybe see only how things are shiny and how blender is doing wonders, but we have the growth pain. That's the term people use. So blender was really developed in an RSC chat, I guess, on your podcast. A lot of those projects used or still used a good old RSC, clients. And really we could go there. There was this channel called blender quarter, which was a channel that broke the RSC convention of having a dash, but Ton had a close relation with the RSC node guys and got his way. He's really good at getting his way. And you could have to go there and basically reach out. If you're a developer, you could share a little bit what you're working on, something that caught your interest.

Dalai Felinto:
And you'd see, you have Ton replying to you as just as part of his day. Ton was always, maybe that's something I don't know if I should share much, but if you send an email to Ton, Ton's going to reply. The reply might be, sorry, don't have time for that. Sorry, please check the community websites. But he really cares. He really makes time to everyone. That's a part of the, I think part his personal agenda, his personal mission. So blender was really this community of people that would still have a centralized guidance. There was the blender conferences, which were the moment where developers and artists that could go to Europe would get together once a year, be on face to face. My first one was 2008. Maybe I can start like explaining a little bit how I got into, because I used blender because I started to study architecture, architecture in urban planning, and I knew some open source software could be used for that.

Dalai Felinto:
So I went there and there was this big website called blender Brazil. Brazil had the biggest forum, at the time, in one of the biggest blender communities. And it was a weekend course, four weekends that I could go and attend to learn the basics of blender. It's really like baby steps. I got into using blender, I started to use it for my projects in university. I went to Canada as an exchange student, got to work at UBC, universal bridge Columbia. Because of my portfolio with blender, we are doing a real time fish visualization, ecosystem visualization, but driven by blender, the blender engine. And we are using blender. The blender engine, at the same time, that the blending Institute were doing their third open project. So we had elephant's dream, it was a movie, big buck bunny, that's the one I told with flashy, high saturated colors.

Dalai Felinto:
And then they had EO, Frankie, which was a game project. So EO Frankie started as a partnership with blender and Chris space. It's an open source engine. And at some point they decided to do the whole thing with the blender and the blender game engine. So there was a lot of attention giving to the blender game engine. It was a good time for us to also depend on it for the project I was working on. And then we found the first bug. That was that simple, how I started getting more involved with the software. That was this one bug where basically had a school of fish. So we had an invisible fish leading the school and have the other fish always, basically was a follow the leader. I forgot the name of it. To just try to keep track of this leading fish, but at some point, every now and then, we would see a wall of fish, a bunch of fish just swimming in one line, like, how is that possible?

Dalai Felinto:
And because blender is open sourced, I could just look at the code. And I went to that function in which was doing this. And it was basically the value of pie. So pie three point 14 was hard coded to five point 14 instead of three point 14. So for some reason, the function which was supposed to flip at some point, if the number was higher, then pie was never finished. So they were just stuck in this perpetuum direction and like, huh, and you change that in a compile blender again, and then everything works. And it's just so magical to be able to hands on contribute something that you use every day and rely on. So I remember then sending the patch. That's a funny thing. People that reviewed my work at the time, this was 11 years ago where people that to this day are still involved with the blender development.

Dalai Felinto:
And then you do patch, another patch. There's a lot of people who would reach out to Ton when they needed developers or technical directors or artists sometimes even. And remember the time Ton got reached out by a company from Canada, they wanted to do full domes for VJs in architects, and then basically Ton contact me to help them. And that's for me, how I really got into blender, because then I had something which was for a client, so I was being paid to do that job. But it's something that was aligned enough within the blender agenda, but the burden of managing myself, dealing with clients, dealing with money, whenever on the blender side. So blender really grew to try to trust those partners. Money is good, it helps. But if the community that grows around blender can be a third party studios, companies, whatever, that not only help blender, but also help to implement things in blend themselves and taking all the burden of doing whatever, it helps to scale a lot.

Dalai Felinto:
So we a little bit have this model of trying to get studios to use blender for feature films and maybe sending artists over to help their pipeline. That happened in Argentina some years ago. It Was basically first feature film with blender. And Ton said, you know what? Let's send two of our top artists to go there to help their pipeline because it's better for us. If they do the film with their own expertise and they contribute back. And then they have one developer there was then contributing to blender instead of becoming a software company, which I think was the alternative. And just getting money and then hiring and then growing and hiring. That's not how we do community open source, at least.

Eric Anderson:
Fantastic. And you became an employee, right? Maybe walk us through the economics a bit on blender, just because I think all of us kind of understand how a business would work and we have some idea of how the foundation would work. You take donations, you have these partner companies, you mentioned earlier, our revenue sources, you run employees as well as community folks. And how do you kind of think about your work when there's bugs and work to be done? What does the community do and what do employees do?

Dalai Felinto:
Nowadays we are trying to define the roles a little bit more. Ton also recently wrote an article to try to lay out his vision, to how the models can be empowered to work with the communities, but out autonomy. What they're trying to have is having the strategic projects is still being done mostly for here, locally in the blending studio. That's not to say that we cannot have strategic parts of blender done remotely. And we have core developers, which are crucial to blender, that work remotely to blender, but this is a way to make sure there's a reason for us to be here. Cause why I'm here in Amsterdam and not in Brazil, like what's the difference. And there must be something to begin from being sitting with artists every day to be seen every day we walk to go to the kitchen, we see the big screen rendering the latest frame of the movie.

Dalai Felinto:
So we are trying to structure ourselves in having strategic projects, at least incubated here. And then once they have their material enough, we can start a process of either retire, usually of hand over to the community, which is done to the modules per se. So modules are the different parts of blender. We have module owners, which are developers and artists. We have module computers, which are the community. A good example of this, the jump to notes project is something I've been quite involved with and something very new and recent to blender where we had as a project going on for one year, I think at least by Jack Luke, one to two years. And we decided to pivot a little bit and try to set up as a project to do particles and animated effects with blender. Consider modeling. Imagine you have a building that you can tweak something that a building gets shorter, gets more or less doors.

Dalai Felinto:
This is very common for instance, for AI training. You want to train your car frontal camera to make sure you don't hit any baby. So I have those mode of humans that you can tweak and they're more taller, shorter, skinnier, fatter, have a baby, no baby, but it's also useful for all sort of things. Motion, graphic, VFX. So we decided to take this project and try to ground this to the studio here. And we started the main design here. And then as soon as we could, we had a well documented list of todos. And then we just had the community contributors joining the project to this day. People just the first contribution we got for jump to nodes, we are not even expecting it. We are still finishing up the documentation to be sure we could have more people to help to build up the project.

Dalai Felinto:
And someone just jumped in. Hey, I saw you guys might need this node, take a subs surf mode. Okay. So let's say strategic projects, try to start incubated here have tactical projects, which is responsibility of the modules. So the moment something is more well defined in the big picture in the big design is currently approved and communicated. Then it's more tactical. The modules can reach out to artists, to other developers trying to get, just, well you work with product, right, Eric? You do. I believe, you know the class it must have and good to have separation of the backlog. Let's say they must have something we can make sure the core team handles and tackles it. And the good to have is a thing that is really, really perfect for the community to collaborate. It fits. This the project we want.

Eric Anderson:
Amazing. The blender team has paved the way a for a lot of organizations on how to do this, I think. Having wrestled with these problems for so long and so successfully. Maybe take us to the current state. What's happening at blender these days, and what can folks do to get involved? Are there blender conferences? Where do people on blender hang out?

Dalai Felinto:
We're still based here in Amsterdam where some restrictions still apply. So this is going to be the second year without a blender conference, which is, it's really sad.

Eric Anderson:
Yeah. It's always in Amsterdam, right? The conference.

Dalai Felinto:
It's always in Amsterdam. We are to have the first America blender conference last year. It's going to be in LA, Los Angeles, to be close to Hollywood studios. Maybe we'll do it next year. We see. So we still hang out online. We are still, even though, as I said, like from outside, feels like, oh, we figured it out. We're still fighting the growth pain every single day. For us, it's been really hard not to be able to hire much or to increase our network during those years, two past years. We even started some HR training here at the Institute itself to try to structure ourselves a bit better, know how we can grow, how we can invest on the existing team, and every now and then, the solution to some of the problem is, oh, let's hire a senior developer, blah, blah, blah.

Dalai Felinto:
Let's hire top designer. Let's hire, but it's so hard now. So, and not like we're stuck, but we're trying to survive at least six more months. Just keep releasing blender, keep working in it. But they do expect next year to start having more workshops. That's something we really want to get. Basically fly people over, developers, studios, artists, and try to tackle one big project at a time. That's something we're doing a lot nowadays since this year, last year, this year, try to instead of having 20 projects happening at the same time. Try to have more people working on the same project and then put my emphasis on, Hey, you are in the community. You want to help? Please check the agenda first, see what you can help on what for developing already. Cause we might not have time or energy to go over every single agenda that people might bring to the table.

Dalai Felinto:
So for anyone wanting to contribute, come online, go join, we have a website called blender.chat, which replace IC. These you can see every day people talking and sharing questions and whatnot. We have every week, we have a weekly notes on what change to blender, notes in the individual modules. Most of the activity is in the modules. So you always ask people, what is our area of interest? Because it's important for people to be motivated, right? To find what is their call and then try to see, okay, maybe that model is well structured. Maybe it's not so much, but if it's well structured, there's probably a meeting every week or every other week. Meetings are always open to anyone. We open to a fault, like for, I don't know, in the history of blender if anyone has been ever permanently banned. Temporarily once or twice, but permanently never, which is, that stones like direction. But we get involved.

Dalai Felinto:
If you're an artist or help testing the new features, we have a very clear data peered in the blender development. Next week, we start the better for the blender 3.0. So people read in court to go and test and try to find new bugs, try to fight from the existing bugs. See if they can help reproduce the bug. They can simplify the files. It's blender, there's a site I put together called metrics at blender.org, where you can see how many basically bug reports we have every day. How many do you think we have?

Eric Anderson:
How many do I think you have?

Dalai Felinto:
Yeah. New bug reports every single day?

Eric Anderson:
New bug reports every day, a couple dozen.

Dalai Felinto:
It's 30 every day. It's a lot. 30 new bug reports every day. We have an average of three to five patches every day from the community, not even including contributors. So we have those numbers that keep going up and like try to manage that. So we definitely need help from people that are interested on getting their hands dirty and really do the job, which is sometimes not as glamorous as changing the user interfacing, adding this new feature that everyone get to use.

Eric Anderson:
Right. Yeah. Maintenance.

Dalai Felinto:
Everything you can do to help may help maybe not a developer to focus on the high priority projects and whatnot, like getting involved. We even hired recently a community developer coordinator. Someone to focus on the online community because it was just so much work. It's a full-time job just to see if the newcomers are being properly onboarded. The documentation is in place. If there's enough artist involved in there in the decisions in the module. Well, I think it's a good moment to be involved.

Eric Anderson:
Fantastic. Dalai, I really appreciate you coming to tell us a story today. Blender, as I mentioned the beginning, I feel like it's paved the road for a lot of other communities and projects to develop. And it's a field. We spend a lot of time talking about like kind of app development software on here. Cause that's often what becomes open source, but it's exciting to see a creative field design.

Dalai Felinto:
It's still a desktop experience. I think it's going to be for a couple of years, maybe whatever.

Eric Anderson:
So folks can find you specifically as well as the rest of the blender community, by going to the blender websites, joining the chat rooms.

Dalai Felinto:
We have enough channels where all the communication can be public. So blender chat. We have dev talk. It's a forum for onboarding. We have the main list if anyone wants to join, but if you go to blender.org and get involved is right there on the main page, you have all the information you need. And if the information is not clear enough, then you can reach out to me and let me know. I'm dalai@blender.org. Send a hi if you listen to this.

Eric Anderson:
Fantastic. Thank you, Dalai. Have a good day.

Dalai Felinto:
Thanks so much, Eric. Bye. Bye.

Eric Anderson:
You can find today's show notes and past episodes at contributor.fyi. until next time I'm Eric Anderson and this has been contributor.