"Money doesn't interest me" - Ton Roosendaal interview

- The community, as you know, they don't really listen to what you tell them to do. They have their own ideas. They want to... So they started working on things, I thought, "(scoffs) What? That's not important. Why would you work on that?" You know what they did? They fixed the Modeler, because they wanted to model. They want to use the software for creative things. And they were right, of course, that's important, alright. And that's what you get if you get communities involved. - [Andrew] I think Blender is in a pretty exciting place right now, 'cause I don't know if you know this, but 10 years ago, Blender's reputation wasn't so great. But today, it serves as a very real competitor to the Big Three, and there's signs of this. RenderMan now officially supports Blender. TurboSquid and Evermotion now offer Blender models. AMD has added their support with OpenCL. And while most large studios still haven't adopted Blender officially, it's becoming increasingly popular among the smaller studios... ...as they no longer see the value in paying thousands of dollars for software, that Blender can essentially do for free. And, what's more, the big 2.8 update is just around the corner, promising a complete UI overhaul, realtime rendering, workspaces, collections, asset management, dependency graphs, all things that I personally think are gonna push Blender into a very real professional category. In this video, I spoke with Ton Roosendaal, that crazy Dutchman who founded Blender. In the interview, we talk about how Blender almost didn't happen; What's holding Blender back; The Autodesk conspiracy, mmm hmm, spicy; Predictions for 2.8, as well as, of course, a healthy dose of UI debate. It's a long chat, but I've included chapter marks in the description, so that you can jump ahead to whatever interests you. And before we start, this video is thanks to the support of Poliigon. To create better renders, you need better textures. So, join Poliigon today and experience the difference that a sharp, professional texture can make. And now, on to the interview. So Ton, it's ... I've been wanting to interview you for like six, seven years. - You did, I forgot, at the Blender Conference. - Yeah, a long time ago. Yeah, and who would have thought it would happen in LA, a place where neither of us are from (laughs). But we got the cameras here. Ton's here, why not? - All the important people are in Los Angeles. That's why we met, we're... In the film business. - Yeah, so they say. Yeah (laughs). I wanna know, because I haven't... I know very little but, what is your background? Have you always been interested in programming? - No, I studied Industrial Design. It's, you know, to make products, product development. I actually wanted to be an Architect, but I met some guy in a bar one night when I was... I wanted to pick a study and he said, "Oh, Industrial Design is so cool because it's and creative and technical, right?" And I liked those. I already liked that, to do something creative and technical. Then I decided to start a company to have money to buy more expensive and bigger computers, and to work full time as a Computer Graphics Designer and to do animation, especially 3D. - How old were you then? - That was when I was 29. - Okay. - That was Neo Geo. And that name, we were first! The game console that was also called Neo Geo, didn't exist then. So we had that name. And it means "New Shape". Geo is form, "Shape". - Oh, okay. - Neo Geo, "New Shape". Ha ha fun, worth the shot. (Andrew laughs) It's Greek, I think, not Latin. Anyway, we want to be cool, huh? We had a nice name and we started a studio in Eindhoven. That was together with a business partner. We got some employees, and suddenly we had like seven people working for us, doing computer graphics. And that's where Blender started, in that environment. So I was doing the clients, and I was doing the art direction, and I was also writing software. And at first I didn't, I thought, come on... I had my business partner, he wrote software. I said, "Come on, we are not a software company, we are a design company. So what are you doing all day programming?" But it was fun, and I could see that. I said, okay let me try a little bit. Oh well, yeah, yeah, this is really cool. I mean coding is really fun. You ever tried coding? - No. - Come on, HTML pages, like ... - Oh, I have, no, no. - All that kind of stuff That's all very fun, right? - I did it in school. Visual Basic is what ... - Code a little bit JavaScript or Python? No nothing? - No, no, no, Visual Basic. - [Ton] Yeah, Visual Basic. - HTML, I did that in school. - It stuck really with me, I really like it. Because you can really focus on that for days and weeks, and then you can make something that works. I thought the first thing to try is a ray tracer. You have some mathematics and lines and bounds and you have normals and some basic high school mathematics, and you can code a ray tracer. And then you say, "Oh, let's go, and now how do you add a texture?" And you have to add some weird formulas and see what happens and how that looks. And then you try to make it faster, optimizing it. And then you want to have a modeler of course. So you try to look at how does that work, and how do you make an interaction work. And slowly it started about in '85 on the Amiga. I did some development. But the real work started more like in '91, When we bought our first big computer, a Silicon Graphics. And it was in those days, THE brand for 3D computers. Because you had a graphics card that could do real-time wireframes and solids. (makes exploding sound) Real-time! And on Amiga you had to render a wireframe. - So you didn't even know what it would look like? - Not real-time wireframes. It was line, line, line, line, line, you had to wait five seconds and you had a wireframe. - Whoa. - So what you had realtime was bounding boxes. That's why Blender still has bounding boxes for it at as a draw type. And it started, in those days, it was the only interactive mode you had with bound boxes. And then you had to push Enter and then (makes machine gun noises) you saw the wireframes. But for sure you would not have any solid rendering at that time. But in '91 we bought a Silicon Graphics that cost the equivalent of $60,000 for one computer. - You bought from Silicon Graphics, $60,000? - All our profits, everything we made we put in one computer. - Wait, how long, when did you start Neo Geo? - In '89. So after two years, we were running okay, but it was all with Amigas. And I mean, all the money we made, we bought one computer. And we didn't have money for the software. So that was ... Alias was available, I think Softimage, and a couple of others. But Alias would cost you another 60,000. So yeah, that was '94, '95, Blender was more or less functional, you could do the first projects with it. And at that time the software was totally designed to work for the projects we do. And then I made all kinds of design decisions that you can still see nowadays in Blender. And some of them were very fortunate and really good. - Gimme an ex ... What's an example? - For example, I used a subdivision interface. In those days, every program would open in 20, 30 different windows, and you had to lay out all of that yourself. And then everything you would do, it would pop up something and you have to fill in the stats and say OK. And then it would apply it, right? And that was a blocking interface which was overlapping. And I thought we should not do that. We should have a flat interface, which you subdivide, and you assign functions and editor type to a subdivision thing. And if you want to have two editors next to each other you should be able to do that. Or you have two windows, you can have that too. But it was basically one window from start, with a subdivision. And you make a layout, the screen. And then you can swap those layouts in and out and have your editings configured. - Where did you get that idea from? - You get that idea by thinking and analyzing. - So you didn't read any user design books, or ... - Jesus, I don't remember. I mean, I think I was inspired by web browsers in those days. - Oh, web browsers. - When the first web browsers started, and the Internet, Internet base did not have the possibility to open windows. And maybe now people hate that anyway, because you have a web and you don't want the web to pop up things, right? So they tried to design web pages that were flat and they had columns and steps and stuff. Or frames, they called them. - Right. - To work, and it was very efficient. I have to go back to my story of the Blender. - [Andrew] Yeah, yeah, okay, so 1999 you were- - We had '95, '96, we had the first Blender version. In '98, I sold the company. - You sold the company? - [Ton] Not for much money, but ... - Neo Geo, the com- - I could take the software, and I decided (makes mouth sound). Because the whole industry (makes mouth sound) went down because - Really? - There was not a lot of money anymore for all this visualization stuff and for video programs. Everybody wanted to have, either games, or Internet, right? The Internet came up. You have to go to the Internet and interactive media and everything. Boring, like who wants to do Internet stuff? Everybody's doing Internet stuff. I want to do something nobody's doing. For example, making a 3D tool. So I decided to start a new company to have Blender there. Put it on the web, I make a website. Get forums and see what happens if I give away the software. And that was '98, uh the Blender, the first version was published. First only the Silicon Graphics version. And then within a few months I had a Linux version, FreeBSD. Then I got an employee, my first and he helped making the Windows version of Blender. That happened within one year. - Where did that idea of giving it away for free come from? Open source? - In the first year of the Not a Number company, the company I founded to market Blender, we didn't have open source, Blender was free but it was not fully free. So there were some features locked. And I sold keys, had the B key and the C key. And you for $50 or $100 you gotta get a key and that would unlock more stuff in Blender. That was how I got my first funding and also to get to SIGGRAPH and present Blender. But then I got investors on board, uh, the Internet bubble, I was there with two people in a little office in a start-up center. And there were people coming in, "Oh my God, your company is worth 10 million." Huh, what? 10 million... Sure... But you have to be very strong to resist that opportunity. Because they said: "Right Ton, you can get 5 million investment money and then that will make you really big. We hire like 50 people employees and you can become a billionaire and whatever." So you have to try if you get that opportunity. It was fun. So yeah I got an investor on board. At first four and a half million and later one million more. And then we got- - Really? Wait, you got a million dollars of investing? Half a million and a million? - Four and a half. - Four and a half? - [Ton] The total was five and a half million. - What? - Money, real money. - What happened to it? Where did that ... - All that money (makes mouth noises), burned it. (makes explosion sound) With a big fire, what do you call it? A vanity bonfire? - Okay. - Well, okay, you watch the TV series Silicon Valley? - Yes. - Yeah, that's my favorite. But it's actually true, it happens like that. It's actually true. - How many people did you hire at the most? - 50. - 50 people? - So I was with 2 and like a few months later we had 50. - That's crazy. - That was crazy. - So you really just burned all the money. (laughs) - We had a big booth at SIGGRAPH and we went to the Game Developers Conference and big business meetings in the Bay Area of course, flying business class, going to Japan. Everything. - Really? - It was not a bad time. - And they were investing so that you would make the software huge and make them more money. - So the business model was to keep the software for free. - [Andrew] Okay. - To give it away. And then make professional services around it. And we had fantastic stuff, we had a 3D Web plug-in. We had 3D on the Web. So you could save a blend file and you could you had a plug-in working in the browser. And then the blend file would load... the plug-in would load the blend file and you would see your stuff. - Really? - Including complete games. The whole game engine was running on the Web. As a Web plug-in. - Wow. - Wow. - The first sketch file. - 10, 15 years too early. So that was, it was fantastic, it was good. Very new, but how do you make money with that? You can only do this if you get like five years. And if you can develop, if you develop the market and then you could start growing a customer base and try to find out where the real money is. But we didn't, and as I said the Internet bubble bursted. And the investors that we had, they wanted to exit within nine months. So the investors called me in, they said: "Ton!... We’re going to stop this. And we're going to put your Blender in a drawer here and lock it up. And you can better do something else. Because this costed us so much money." And at that time, of course, I had nothing left. In the beginning I owned 100% of Blender. And I ended up with 10% still. - So you had to buy back Blender essentially. - Basically. - Right. But that took a while to convince them. And that was the famous "Free Blender" campaign that happened in 2002 in the summer. When within seven weeks we got 110,000 Euros and dollars, that was the same amount, collected via the community. - So you asked the community- - And that was what I negotiated with the... investors. I said well, let's be fair, Blender is not worth anything at the moment. It's 2002, there's a crisis. Nobody invests anymore. Nobody would buy this software without me because it's totally un-understandable piece of shit with Dutch comments in the code and stuff. So without me, it's not worth a lot. So here's the proposal: I will do a campaign online to collect money from the users, and I will get you 100,000 Euros as a license to make Blender open-source. So you keep the rights, but you give it away as open-source and you publish it as open-source. Under the most strict license, the GNU GPL, is considered to be very extreme license and only allows software to stay free. And you cannot use the Blender code in a commercial product, unless you make that commercial product open. And so that's why Blender is always free. It has to be free forever, that's in the license. That's how this system works. So if you owned the rights of a piece of software which is licensed as GNU GPL like Blender, you can still have the same copyright and put it yourself in a commercial product, and you can sell that. That's how the license works. - And that's how someone is able to sell Blender on the Ebay or whatever? - Yeah, they can. - Legally, yeah. - They can, they can do whatever, but as for as long as you give them the software... Anyway, so, in seven weeks time, we had the money. And it was amazing. - What year, what year is this? - 2002. - Okay. - Yeah, you were not using Blender though ? You were still in high school or so, doing things. - I started using it in 2003. - Yeah! - Yeah, so I guess, yeah a couple of years later. - It was one year later. But it was amazing. And it is unofficially, I think, the first crowd funding ever. - Is it really? - Yeah. Because it's, it had... We had perks, and we had things- - Did you really? You had perks? (laughs) - People could make a promise. I said well you have to sign, that you'd pay a certain amount of money. But if you get the goal, then you have to cash. - Oh, look at that, early Kickstarter. You were ahead of the times. - Six, five years. I’m always ahead of the time. You try to do something because nobody does it, Right? That's fun. Anyway so I suddenly had an open-source project so I had to read up about open-source, how that works and stuff. But originally, I thought it would not work, uh. That open-source thing is not, I don't know. But it was mainly for me as a little monument to have Blender online and the software for the users, so they can always keep using it. And also for everybody who worked on it, uh, the developer team in the company that they could take their software and share away to the other companies, or use it further. It was more like a symbolic wrap. More than a new future. And within a year, I found out that it was actually working. And making Blender open was totally the best thing I could ever do. - Yeah. - Suddenly you got a whole interesting community dynamic going on, right? And the community, as you know, they don't really listen to what you tell them to do. They have their own ideas. They want to... So they started working on things, I thought, "(scoffs) What? That's not important. Why would you work on that?" This fantastic web plug-in and all this stuff. 3D on the Web, imagine! And nobody was interested. You know what they did? They fixed the Modeler, because they wanted to model. They want to use the software for creative things. And they were right, of course, that's important, alright. And that's what you get if you get communities involved. They're not always wrong. I mean, a lot of people actually do really really good stuff. And they do what they think is important. It's what is in their interest. More than what they think, "I have a dream. I have a vision of how the Internet will look like in 10 years." Pff... Not interested, right? This should work today or tomorrow, or I want to have it now. I'm not going to invest in something that takes 10 years. Certainly not in open-source. There are always like, very short term, little things to move on. But then you can say, "Okay, I can help with that. You only need one little thing? Like to fix two tips or something like that? Okay, I can handle that." And that's how you grow your community and that's how the developers got on board. - Could I ask, at that time when you made it open-source, did you ever imagine that it would be this many years later with as big as it is? - No. Totally not, totally not. - What did you think was gonna happen? - At first I thought nothing would happen. But it would be there and it would slowly fade away. - [Andrew] Really? - Like, it was fun for people that they could still use it. Many programs died, if you look at it, in the past. A lot of projects, they have some interest from people, and then they all move on and they go somewhere else. I think that didn't happen for Blender for a couple of reasons. Of course one is, there are no competitors, right? There is nobody having a functional 3D creation tool in open-source. - Oh, so there's no open-source competition? - There was no, in the open-source world, there was no competition. And also not the renderer ... Yeah, okay there were some renderers, but the production, it was production ready. Like you could do good stuff with it. It had some hair, had some this, has the video editor, textures, there was a lot of interesting things going on. Character animation. You could do things in Blender. And that was a complete creation package. As it is now, but it was then too. So with one program, you could start it up, and then you end up with a finished product. Like something a film, or a clip, or a presentation, or a visualization, or a little game. But everything is possible to do in one program. And that makes Blender a special tool. Because people can put their whole life in it, right? And the moment they fire it up, then they make things. And it's just with one program. And that what is special. I mean, with GIMP or with Inkscape, or Photoshop or OpenOffice, or something, you don't have that very special relationship with a piece of software. And so that made Blender special. And of course Blender was not that bad, right? It had a couple of good concepts behind it. And a couple of really good developers with smart brains got on board. And they said, oh, that's fun, let's see what happens. And this community dynamic. And of course everybody was really proud that they got the money together. And it was all lots of good vibe to make something happen. But the first year, I hardly didn't do anything for it. Only set up the Foundation and the website, and make sure that everybody could work, because I really wanted to see what are people going to do, What is their focus? Or what will they pick up? Or how does it work? I have to learn it. And then later on I picked up programming again. And especially maintaining the Mac version for Blender. - I had no idea that Blender had such a corporate beginning. Like you had five million dollars, fifty people, that sounds like the start of like a... like an Autodesk story or something. - Yeah. - How did you go from pursuing the money to suddenly going like, everything is free? What was... Did something change in your- - No. But I was never interested in money. Money doesn't mean anything. It's not interesting. I call myself a maker. I want to make stuff. And whether that's software, or 3D, or designs, or building teams or companies, I want to make stuff, that's my passion. And the money is a means. Uh, sometimes you need it to do something big. So you have to work, make money, and then you can do something with it. But the real satisfaction is in making something. That's making Blender, making the Foundation, making books, making the training DVDs, and later on making the films. And doing a software business, and there was an option, I mean, after the bankruptcy, we also looked at "Okay, maybe we could make Blender commercial. And then do it very cheap, like for $50 or so, and with two or three developers and continue it as a small company." But that's simply something I didn't like. It would be too uninteresting, and then you had to sell software. It's boring, right ? On the Internet, it gets a bit easier with the App store and stuff, you have ways to monetize things. But in those days, or the way how Cinema 4D and other programs have to sell software, it’s half of your money on overhead goes to the sales department. Or more. You have to set up a typical business that is very sales-driven and then you only have a few clients and you make it for them. And the only relationship we really have with them is that they pay you and then you give them something back for it. It doesn't feel like something I want to do. That's not my maker thing. - How many people work for the Foundation at the moment? - Well, the Foundation doesn't have employees. - [Andrew] Okay. - So the... there's the Institute. - Oh, okay sorry. So the Institute, how many people does the Institute- - So the Foundation, to be clear, the Foundation is the public benefit. That’s the safe, and it's a real foundation. And the Foundation should only be used to make sure there is always continuity. For all the copyright is there, the ownership of blender.org, the website URL's, the registrations, a lot of copyright on the Blender software is in the Foundation. And the Foundation has a non-commercial, non-profit goal, public benefit, so whatever is there is meant to help the goal, keep Blender free, and help people to use Blender. The Institute is something I started in 2007, after the first open movie. And that movie business is what I brought back after five years of open-source development. Because I thought it was all going a little bit into a very nerdy, technical, typical open-source world, where the programmers are telling everybody what they have to do. That's why a lot of people hate open-source projects so much. And they all say, "The most bad, sucky interface ever, and they don't listen to users, and they're only interested in their own beautiful nice code." And I didn't want that. I like to work with artists. I'm a creative person myself. I don't think beautiful code or fantastic, well-designed software is interesting. What I'm interested in is working software. If it works, right, then we have something good. And if something beneath there is ugly and horrible, then okay, you should fix that one day, but it works, right? Way more important than things that are beautiful but they don't work. So many people say, "Look at my code, It's the most beautiful code ever." And then nobody uses it. Why, why right? "Nobody's using my fantastically beautiful code." Well, maybe because it's not usable, right? Or not interesting for users to have. - Right. - So that's the thing I wanted to bring back, and that's why we started the Blender Institute, at the studio there, to make frequently films or even a game. To get artists on board to work together with the developers to always make sure that whatever we do, there's always a user breathing down your neck telling you, "Yeah, that's nice, but I would like to have working hair. And I want to have combing tools. And I want to have better rendering. And I want to have global illumination. And I want to have ... The things you actually need for production. And not the things you need because the community votes for it. - So Elephant's Dream was 2006? - Yeah. - And then that's when you made the Institute. And what was that, Big Buck Bunny, two thousand- - Seven and eight. And there was the Sintel. And every film had their own technical targets. The Elephant's Dream, the whole animation system was re-done. We had our first compositor, built in Blender. 2005 or six. - That's pretty crazy. - Yeah, that's crazy, and there were node systems that could do materials and stuff. Now 2007, for Big Buck Bunny it was mostly character animation, further improvements for the deformation, and hair, fur, combing, grass, all that kind of stuff. High quality rendering as well. So better anti-aliasing. For Sintel, the 2.5 project, to get rid of a lot of shitty old interface code ... - In what year? - For Sintel in 2010, - Oh, right. - And it was 2.5 - Yeah. - When we did a lot of work on the interface. You remember that? - I remember that. - So that was a big leap. - Yes. - That was a big leap. - It was. - People thought at first, eh. Blender was really weird, and then suddenly it became less weird, right? It was like, oh, I recognize some of those things. And they were a little bit more accessible or better structured. And especially we added a way, anyway, what I'm mostly proud of, in 2.4 if you would slide a value for a button, you had to release it to see an effect. - [Andrew] What? - You had to release the button and then you saw an update. - [Andrew] Oh, right. - For everything you did in the interface, every widget, every tool, every button you did, it was not live updated. - Right. - You had do it, and then it had an update. And suddenly all things were all parallel, you remember that? - Yeah, I remember that. I remember the first time I used it, was like the particle system, so it was running these particles down, and then I increased the number of particles and they'd go (makes helicopter noise). And I was like : Wow. - Wow, the thing is running. - And you could rotate it and move it around and it's like shooting everywhere. Yeah, it was like a game. - But that's not easy to do. That is a very, I call that a very ... The system would have to be very well balanced. Every little component has to fit. And if one thing doesn't work, not everything works, or it crashes. - Right. - So during Sintel, we made 2.5 workable. It was... Almost every line of the core Blender code had to be rewritten for this. And the whole code, it was, I forgot, a million lines or something. They all had to be done, one by one, everything. All thrown away and re-coded. And that was big. And I could do that thanks to, of course at that time we had more donations. I got some subsidies. The E-Shop was doing really well. We could sell DVD's. We sold in the end, almost 6,000 DVD's with Sintel on it and the data files. - Really? - Yeah, and every DVD was 34 Euros. - That's quite a lot of money. - Quite nice, you can do stuff with that. So, that helped us getting, having everything fixed and then we could hire developers. And it was Brecht, of course, Brecht von Lommel. And we had Campbell. And basically, with the three of us we were the core of the 2.5 team. And loads of great volunteers around it to make it possible. And now we get, of course, Tears of Steel. With motion capture, uh sorry motion tracking, masking, the whole visual effect pipeline. And the first project we used Cycles for. Cycles... - Oh right, of course, yeah. - Cycles popped up, yeah, surprise. - Yeah. - That was great. What about "Yo Frankie!"? - Well sorry I missed that game, that was in between. That was a bit... before Sintel. But "Yo Frankie!" I usually forget it a bit because it was not a complete success. It had mixed things a bit. Because I thought as an experiment, I was too optimistic, but I thought let's do something, an open project, with another community, another open-source community. So they were game engine ... - Oh, Crystal Space? - It's Crystal Space, yeah. - Yeah, and it didn't work? - No, it didn't work. I was really spoiled with the quality of how the Blender community, at that time, they were already very professional. High quality artists, good developers. You could really sit together and say, "Okay guys, we are going to, huh, what are we going to do?" And we already did that a couple of times, for two movies. And I thought for the game project we could simply set a nice target and a big leap forward and simply by doing it, by announcing it and putting some money in it, and making awesome content, it will happen. The magic of open movies. But for Crystal Space, that didn't work. - Can I ask, a lot of people wonder why the game engine part of Blender hasn't had a lot of attention on it. - Because halfway the Yo Frankie! we switched from using Crystal Space to using another game engine. And it was mainly thanks to one developer. It was a guy from Belgium, Benoît. And he sat down and started fixing every day, like everything. And later I heard that he is a daddy and he had his little kid playing with Blender. And he wanted to make a game in Blender. "Okay, sure, let's see. Ah! It's a bug, I'm going to fix that. Uh! Another bug." So he was simply working with his son, fixing Blender to have his kid able to make a game. And meanwhile, we were working and struggling with this game project, and we thought, "The Blender game engine is way too unstable. Nobody can fix that, so we have to use Crystal Space." And suddenly, he started fixing everything. - [Andrew] Oh, I didn't know this. - And it was so good. But those kind of things are hard to organize. How do you find ... he's a top software engineer. He’s hired by big companies and stuff. I can't even afford him God, he's really good. He's working for medical simulations, and that kind of things. He's good, he's still on board, he do sometimes things. But he's fantastic. And he made it to work but then he had to do other stuff. And then we were stuck a little bit again, right? So yeah, why the game engine? I think the game engine's main problem is that the original design from 2000, in the Not a Number company we did design the game engine, that a whole lot of design decisions were wrong. They were not good. So we had all kinds of assumptions about how to put it in Blender, and most of them didn't work out. And they didn't work out in a way that you would get a natural evolution of increasing quality in the software. And with Blender, a lot of those design decisions were very lucky, they were good. And if they were bad, you could fix it. But then you had an evolution, as you know from Blender, where Blender kept improving and improving and improving. And it's like crazy, it's amazing how much improvement we could afford with a piece of software from '95. - Gosh, yeah. - So that's the good thing of Blender. And the Blender game engine, it's a pain and it's mostly, a lot of... The worst thing that the game engine didn't do well was that it completely duplicated the code, right ? So if any feature we add in Blender, we also have to do that again in the game engine. So you get two code bases for the same feature. Not for everything, but for a lot. Like for example, even now, we added EEVEE in Blender, it's nothing. The game engine, you have to duplicate it again. So and that's not, sounds simple but it's not, because adding software is only stable if you keep working on it and looking at it. And there's hundreds of people online working on the bug tracker, the important things, and really make that work. And so the amount of feedback people give on the Blender code and the Blender usability is way higher than the amount of feedback and energy that goes to the game engine. And the game engine, every time, they have to find time to copy the fixes and the code over, alright? So all the energy that went to Blender, doesn't go to the game engine. So if we would have designed a structure where, let's say 90% of the game engine would be using the same code as Blender, then the game engine would have benefited from all the work on Blender itself. And the maintenance of the game engine is much smaller. And that's my proposal for a new design for the 2.8 game engine, is to- - Yeah, tell me about the plan. - Yeah, we have to reuse much more. And now it's not fun. The most game engine coders... You know game engine coders? There's a special type of people who do that. It's like render engine coders, raytracer coders, because you have something and it's a piece of abstract stuff, that's a code thing. And you can completely control it. It's exciting; it's fun, right? - [Andrew] Yeah. - And then you can make it faster. Or you can make it... Add some features. And it's a nice thing you can hold in your hand, as I do here. And you don't have to do a lot with other people. Really, even better, great stuff for the computer coders, the nerds who don't like people a lot. They want to have technology to play with. And Blender is not like that. Blender is dirt, and messy, and complicated. And lots of other people are doing things. "And he's doing something, and here something falls over." So that's a different approach. So, that's uh... So this game engine, idea for 2.8 is to make sure that most of it will become part of the Blender project. So, for example, you have EEVEE and EEVEE, suddenly everybody's making fantastic things with it. Animation is coming back in EEVEE this week or next week. - Animation? - Animation. Of course, animation play-back, real time characters, all the stuff. - Oh, that isn't in there yet? It's not yet, but now it's coming. All the modifiers, subdivision surfaces, it's gonna be a fairly high quality production engine. And it's real time. (Andrew laughs) So having that in the game engine, that would make things so easy for users. So you've got modeling, you press P for the game engine and everything is the same, it's real time. You animate something and you can do the same animation. It should be fluid, this. - Yeah, but maybe don't make it P. (laughs) The number of times I hit that. - A foot pedal, a foot pedal. - Yeah, yeah. - I hate the P key. - Or maybe Control-Shift-Alt-C? - Yeah, of course, the five buttons. Or waving at your screen. - Yeah, yeah, gestures. What's the plan with the interface for 2.8? Cause there was a time, a few years ago where I proposed a plan for a crazy interface. Wasn't that great of an idea, but I got a lot of people thinking. So what's happening with the- - Yeah, what happened with your fantastic design? What happened with it? (Andrew laughs) I mean- - In the recycling bin. - The design was not bad, I mean, that's what we agreed on. It was not that you did something stupid, but the thing was mostly to keep it practical. We have Blender, and how do you get Blender to become better? How do you improve it? And that's a different task, a different design task than making a new design for it. It was difficult to apply that. You say, "Okay, here's the design, and I'll let... send Blender to make it work for it." - [Andrew] Right, yeah. - So it should be more the opposite. So here you have Blender, and what is a better way to use it? So how can we improve it that it becomes easier to learn or better configurable, all those other things. - Right. - And for 2.5, we tackled a couple of topics. But we left a lot, and that's why I decided let's do a 2.8, which has similar ambition. Really big things. And make sure that Blender is ready for the next decade. - Decade, whoa. - Yeah of course, it's almost 2020. - I know, right? - It goes really fast. - Yeah, Blender's gotta keep with the times. - So we have to, because 2.5, the whole design process and everything was started 10 years ago, almost. And then we were finished in 2010. So now, last year, we started 2.8, and it will be 2018, right? - Yeah, so it's gonna be finished at the start of 2018? - I hope, I hope, if everything works out. - If you had to put money on it, what day would it release? - Yeah, with the mo... I think the planning is to get a better version in March, April. - Okay, right, right. - Something. Could work. - So maybe June. And then by the end of, or at the conference Blender in October next year, we could have the first official release. - Oooh. - Or maybe at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver. But I want to hurry up. People have to be... it also needs to be practical. We can't do everything, so we have to depend on really good people who know how to code things. Anyway, so what is wrong with the Blender interface? Well, there's a couple of things. A lot of people... First, you don't have to like every UI and people have their own preferences and their own way of working, or sometimes they are used to work with a specific tool. And they'd like Blender to do the same. The other problem is that, what we tried with the UI was to make one configuration work for everyone. - You tried? - Yeah we, everybody in our community tried. And that's where your P key problem. Like you hit it all the time. It's stupid! Right? And so we added, for the animators, that the up arrow would not advance 10 frames anymore, that it would go to the next keyframe. I hated that, I was used to clicking the up arrow to go in steps of 10 to go through my animation. - So they did change it, I thought something happened. - And I had to Control-Up. That was just the developers decided. I'm not deciding everything. But, so, you get different types of users and they have different types of interaction. They have different shortcuts or tools they think are more important. So we decided to, instead of having one configuration for everyone, we should allow Blender to be configured for different types of workflow. An animator is not so interested in having the game engine, the motion tracker, all the stuff. You can remove easily half of the shortcuts which is not interesting for animation. All the stuff that is useful maybe for modeling or for physics and particle system, and all that stuff, or modifiers. Animators can configure the software for them to be fast, with all the arrow keys and the clicks doing exactly what they want. For the modeler or the sculptor or 3D painter or video editor or motion tracker, you can basically have it the same. They say, "Okay I'm motion tracking this shot or this film. I have to work for two or three weeks only on motion tracking. I want my tool to help me to do my work faster and more efficient, and less mouse toying or whatever." They can configure that. So that's meant for the power user set, that's the hardcore users. But what I added to that was, well lets also then try to make a configuration for more occasional users. Not everybody's working on 3D professionally. But there's a lot of people who say, "Yeah but sometimes I want to do something in 3D. I want to make a 3D print, or I have a 3D scan, I want to retopo it and print it out. Or I want to have a little model for a yard application." Because 3D is now mainstream, right? 3D is part of your education nowadays. Everybody should understand it a bit. - You think? - Yeah, it's coming. In Canada, high school kids have to do a 3D classes. - Really? - Yeah. - They have to? - Yeah. - Mandatory? - Part of their curriculum. Autodesk one, they picked. We tried to get Blender in the high schools but Autodesk won. - The story of Blender. - Yeah, nah... We don't have enough money to bribe the right people I think, right? So... - What do you think of Autodesk? - What do I think of Autodesk? - Yeah, yeah, cause I know- - They're my best friends. (both men laugh) I usually try to meet Autodesk people in the SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles or elsewhere. But this year I was too busy and didn't have time, but last year I had a couple of meetings. - So you meet... Sorry, you meet Autodesk people at SIGGRAPH, how does it go? Do they ever go like, "You said on Twitter..." - Ah, yeah they want to sue you. No, they're nice. So once I had, the last year I saw the head of Arnold. They were bought by Autodesk. And talking to them about things, because they wanted to get Arnold also in Blender. How to work with that: problems, licenses, stuff like that. And I had a meeting with guys about FBX. Because FBX is the standard, right, for a lot of artists to move animation data from one application to the other. Especially in the games industry, everybody's using FBX. But it's a locked-in format, and Autodesk is frustrating everybody who tries to reverse engineer it, by changing the format every year. Just for fun. - Wait, who is? - Autodesk. - They are? - It's a strategy, yeah. They simply obscure things and they make things to make sure that everybody who has their own FBX thing for writer, reader, every year you have to update things and fix it. - Oh, no. - No, that's not fun, right? - What did you tell them? - I told them that. They said, "Yeah, yeah, well there's technical reasons for that, blah blah blah." They don't really admit this. - Financial reasons. - But I said, yeah, but you have ... What would be better if you say we are going to do something for open-source, or for our users that makes sure that interoperability between Autodesk product and other products that is smoother. If the industry works together, that's a win-win situation. And they listened and they said they would come back to that. But I didn't really push this. But I've never heard back. I think, internally, Autodesk is of course, they have their own policy. It's a two billion dollar company. - Is it two billion? - Two billion every year in revenue. So they are worth 10 or so, I don't know. It's not a small business. - It's huge. - Yup, it's big. And they're on the stock market. So they're publicly traded. So they are not so easy. I'm myself, I can decide every day what I want to do. But they have a job. They have a boss and then a Vice President and then a Senior Vice President and then a Director. But that's how big companies go. These things are not so simple. - [Andrew] Right. - But what's further, Autodesk is of course a company with a, I think with a philosophy that they want to lock-in the users of their own world. And so whatever is possible with 3D, Autodesk should give them the full package. And if they don't have something, they buy it. - [Andrew] They what? - They buy it. You know, Arnold, ... Most of the tools, from Maya to 3D Max to Arnold to ... Flame, you name it, they all bought. They didn't make it. They buy them. And then they stamp it with "Autodesk". And that's how they can create an infrastructure where everything is happy and beautiful and everything works together. But not if you use one of the competitor tools. Of course, that's how Capitalism works, right? (Andrew laughs) I mean, you can't complain about that. And I don't blame them, it's- - Who's making the open Alembic system? - Alembic? I think it's ILM, or ... - Oh. - I think it's ILM. - And they also did OpenEXR didn't they? - Yeah. - Yeah. So they're more into the open ... - Oh yeah, the film industry is totally into it. - They must hate this FBX every year thing. - Yeah, but they never... They use Maya so they don't have a problem with that. We hate it, especially. - Yeah, I bet. Can you make it reverse? Like can you make it FBX that's proprietary work with Blender? Is that legally ... - What some people wanted us to do is to get the FBX library from Autodesk and put that on Blender. That's the official way, how the other applications do it as well. And then you get the Autodesk quote and you link it with Blender and you have FBX in and out. But the Autodesk license doesn't allow that, to combine it with open-source. Or for some people the other way around, the Blender license doesn't allow to use the FBX library. They're completely different worlds. Uh, for example, if you would do that, then we're not allowed to bundle it. But then if you start Blender then you have to go to the Autodesk website and register there. And then download that component. Or we have to do that on our website and give Autodesk all the information from every user who downloaded Blender. That's in their license. - Really? - So any program who has an agreement with Autodesk to use FBX is following that guideline. They give all the privacy and all the personal information to Autodesk. - Oh, and that's why you wrote that post, yeah. - Nobody reads those licenses. - And this one is quite bad, isn't it? - It's horrible. - Yeah, it's not ... - They can visit you at home if you use Autodesk and check your computer, what's on it. - That's a good quote. (laughs) - Some people ask me, "Hey Ton, if I use Blender, the art I make, can I, or, is that my property? Can I do whatever I like with it?" Of course. That's open the Free Software Foundation, our philosophy, right? We are making free software; do whatever you do with the content. Autodesk, on the other hand, they also have "educational" versions. In the license, it says that everything you make with educational software is not your property. You cannot do whatever you like with it. It is restricted. You can only do a little bit with it. But you cannot do other things with it. So basically Autodesk controls the content for that. - Ohhhhh. - Especially for commercial use or use inside of companies or if you want to sell something. You can only use it to learn the software, but not to do anything with the content. - And that's... - And that's... And then they complain about Blender having an evil license. But, of course, everybody ignores- - Wait, who says that? Who says that? - I get that kind of emails. It gets less, but even today, at a business meeting with a studio, and they say, "Yeah yeah, we are thinking about Blender, but the license, you know? And then, if we start using Blender then we might get sued or have patent problems." - By who? - "Is the content ours? If we use Blender is it really ours? Because we get free software? Maybe the content is then yours." I said no. (Andrew laughs) I do hear rumors that Autodesk is spreading that story. - What? - Yeah. Autodesk tells people. - That's a conspiracy, Ton. They go to companies and say, "Don't use Blender because now, open-source. The content you make has to be open too, so you have to share it, or everything." They spread those rumors. So shame on you. - (Andrew is laughing) - Autodesk. - Well, allegedly ... Well, not even allegedly, rumored, we should say. - Rumors. - I heard - You heard from ... - I heard it. - But I heard it from people who heard it from Autodesk. So there's only one in between, right? So half of this... It's a witness, right? It's like you, you could tell me, and then it's... I have to believe you. So yeah, especially studios in Europe and also in Australia, or Indonesia, they get visitors from Autodesk. And if they say, "Ah, we are using Blender," then especially they get visitors from Autodesk. "Knock, knock! Hey! I'm your Autodesk... sales representative. I see you're using Blender. I have something much better. Let's talk, maybe we can give you nice discounts or things to make sure that you're kicking Blender out." - Whoa, this sounds very- - This really happens. - Really? - Yeah. - Sounds very 1984. - It's normal business. Why is that nasty? They make money with it, it's what they have to do. I don't make money with it, so I don't care. If they want to use Maya, they should use Maya, - Yeah. - Right? - So you believe the product should speak for itself, right? Like if it's better, you use the better one. - Everybody should decide that for themselves. I think there's a bit of a difference between how Blender is in the open-source world and some people use open-source software out of principle. GIMP or Inkscape or open-source video editors. They want to live in an open world, they use Linux, and they only use the open drivers, and they make sure that the whole system only uses open-source. And for them, Blender is of course fantastic, pretend they have an open tool to do things. But, that might be, I don't know, one percent of the users, maybe. It's a tiny fraction of the people, use Blender out of principle. Most people use Blender because it's fun or because they like it, or because a fun community. Or because of the freedom, yeah, you can have it legally, you don't have to worry about evil corporations visiting you. Or simply because it's good enough for them. They like it. I mean, you know that. - Of course. - Why do people come to the Blender Guru site to buy stuff? Because they want to have fun, or they're interested to develop skills, or they want to know how to make real grass and then they model this in a city in front of a house, right? But, then with one button, they can make it look awesome. - Yeah. - Right, and that's fun. That's stuff people like. It's playing with 3D, learning from it, and the next time you make a better house. Or you gotta training how to make good architecture or to make the light for that. And people like to develop those kind of skills. And I think Blender is more than good enough for that. I don't uh... That's not the same level of Maya or Max. Or even better, I don't think Maya or Max would ever make that possible. Like what you do. - You know what's funny? I, very early on, I was, after I started Blender Guru I thought maybe Blender's not the best for the future. Like I don't know... It seems like 3ds Max could be bigger. Yeah, so what I did was I emailed Autodesk and I said, "Hey, I just wanna check legally, am I able to have a tutorial website, I'll call it 3ds Max Guru, whatever, and I make tutorials about your software." And they couldn't give a straight answer. They had... They didn't know... They said, "Well, we would have to get back to you. We have to check with the legal team." - What? - And I thought forget it. - 3D Max Guru would not be approved then? - Yeah, I know, so it's like they don't want tutorials for their ... I don't know, maybe it was just the person I spoke with. - Yeah, but it's a locked-in system. So there are not many Max users, legal ones, or legal Maya users. - That's true. - Most of them have the student version of it out there. Free version. - I know. - And that's a bit of a problem. That's why what I said so, thanks to Blender, you can do this and the Cookies and others, they can do things, because there are users that can get the software. They can get it for free. It's an interesting product. It's not an evil corporation behind it. And then they build a relationship with you. Cause you do something, you add value to the product. And that's what people like. And that's why people like other people who make Blender products as well. And if you would do this for Maya, you would get a completely different thing because the first step for them is they'll have to buy Maya. Or they have to buy Motor or you have to buy any other product. And that's a big investment. - It is, yeah. - It's really, why would they pay 3,000 per year for the software and then have for fun, right? Or for training yourself or doing something. - It's a lot. - Yeah. - It's a huge amount. I was thinking that, like I... I didn't realize how much more expensive it is. Like I use Adobe Creative Cloud, the subscription. And it's $600 per year. But you get Premiere, Photoshop, After Effects, Audition, InDesign, you get like 20 pieces of software. $600 a year. And then we were looking at, for Poliigon, like purchasing 3ds Max so we could make tutorials. It's three grand. And then you wanna do one for Maya: another 3,000 per year. And I was like (makes exploding sound), blows my mind. I don't know how they get away with that. That's crazy; doesn't make any sense to me. - Well that's because they don't sell that many. - Yeah? You think it's still quite niche? - I mean the 3D market is small. I mean you could look it up. I wrote that; remember you said you saw that on the wiki? So I went to the public report from Autodesk and look at okay what how much money do they make? Okay two billion per year. And then you get more information and see okay, the whole of the media, this is the media department of Autodesk, that's where Mudbox, Arnold, Maya, 3D Max, and all those tools are. Makes $100 million revenues per year. 100 million, that sounds fantastic. But it's all of them. - Yeah, that's not a lot is it? - So imagine half of that is 3D Max, that's 50 million. Max costs three, four thousand per year? Divide that, 50 million divided by 4,000. - I don't know what that is. (they laugh) Calculator. - That's 12,000 licenses. - Is it? - What, he's calculating it. - [Man's Voice] 12,500. - That's quite ... - That's nothing. - That's an alarming ... - They have discounts and things. Maybe it's 25,000 or 30,000 per year. - You get more downloads than that in a month, right? Blender gets more downloads than that in a month. - Most, but there probably is a million downloads every year or so for Max or for Maya at the Autodesk website. And for the training and the student versions. But the paying user base is not that big. - [Andrew] Yeah, yeah. - And with that amount of money they can't have a lot of people developing. So, there's maybe 10, 20 Maya developers. And they have a group in China now, in a Chinese factory- - [Andrew] Wait, there's only 10 or 20 developers? There's only 20 developers? - Yeah, 10 or 20, something. - For 3ds Max or Maya? - For Maya. Max is bigger but Maya is not that big. - [Andrew] I would have thought there'd be like hundreds. - And then how do they pay them? There's not that much money for it. - It's like $100 million. - But Maya is maybe one tenth of the size of 3D Max. - Is it, whoa? - Or maybe 20%. Come on, how big is it? You have 100 million, you have to divide it right? You have stuff going to Mudbox, there's stuff going to the compositing software, the stuff, huh? So what is 10% is Maya? 20%? It's nothing. - It's not a lot, is it? - You can get 20 people or so, 30 ... And of course you have to pay all the sales people and the marketing people and the key interlock installators. And you have to pay the resellers. People who resell the software, they get a percentage. And then you have very expensive booths at SIGGRAPH. And you add up all those things, so and then there's a little bit left for the developers. - Where did you get that 100 million figure from? Where's that from? - You can find it online. - Yeah? - Yeah. - I tried to find it, I couldn't find anything. - (laughs) You have to find better, man. - I know, maybe I was typing in "users" and I couldn't find actual user statistics. - No, of course not, what you have to ask for is annual report, Autodesk. - Right, financial reports. - Annual reports. And that's the official report they have to deposit because they're a public traded company. - [Andrew] Shareholders, yeah. - Every public traded company has to publish the numbers. And then you start digging, yeah it's boring, it's whatever, 100 pages of stuff. And then you see some numbers, it's like ah ha. The media and entertainment division, that's what it's called officially, is five percent of the revenue of all of Autodesk. So it's like, oh, that's just the number they said. Yeah, okay let's see, the total is two billion, times five percent. - Yeah. - One hundred million. - Here you are, what did you do in high school? - I did not do a lot. - I'm good in the numbers. As a coder you have to be able to divide in your brain. - No, that's the one thing I like about Blender, is you can do the math in the (makes typing noise). - Well I type it in Google. 150 times 20. - Yeah yeah. Yeah, yeah, I do that. - That's how you start. And they say okay, that's 100 million that's the size of the media and entertainment group. Now what can I find more? So I want this and that, and you say well, that's not a lot of money. Most of the money, they are making with, Not with AutoCAD even. Most of the money they made with visualization. Visualization. - [Andrew] What do you mean? - The car industry, ... Architecture companies. So there's the whole... There's a lot of technical visualization going on in the world. And there's very specialist, all industry... You know industry, right? The stuff... I mean the happy 3D art and Games World for only smiling people walk around. But there's a whole world of factories and companies and there are engineers sitting behind work stations doing boring things like floor plans and things and pipes. And that's how you build a house or a car or, right? And that industry is way way bigger than the whole film industry and the games industry together. - Is it? - Of course. - I would have never guessed that. I thought that ... - What do you think? How do you make a car? Have you looked at it? (Andrew laughs) I think you spent way more money on making a car than making a movie. - [Andrew] Really? - Otherwise, if I wanna see a movie only it's $10. Buying a car will cost you 50,000. - Oh, well that's a good point. I was thinking profit. - You know how many people have a car? - It's a lot. - How do you make them? - [Andrew] It's a good question. - And they all cost 20, 30,000 each. Try to do the math. - Yeah. - Those companies are way bigger. - Well, when you say it like that. But I was just thinking like the movie industry they say is one of the most profitable industries, right? Because of how ... - Nah. Like even the duds, the movies that do terribly critically, they're still, you know, making 80 million profit or whatever it's not unusual. So I thought it's huge. - That's why Disney buys everything. Disney bought Pixar, they bought Lucas, they bought- - Whoa, Disney didn't buy Pixar, did they? - Yeah, Disney bought Pixar. - Aren't they in a- - Ya, it was ... - It's an agreement, isn't it? It's a partnership. - It was way bigger than Pixar, way. They have so much. - Oh, I know Disney's bigger. - They have TV and parks and ... - Of course, but I don't know if they bought Pixar. I don't that's true. - Yeah, they bought Pixar. - [Andrew] Is it? - If you go to a Pixar movie, you get first the Disney logo. - Yeah, but it was a- - A merger, you thought. - It's an agreement. Didn't you read that Creativity Inc.? - Ask Google. Disney bought Pixar, question mark? And it will tell you. - See the problem is we put this out there and then the information is wrong, then 100% of the comments are, "Andrew, you're wrong. Pixar's owned by Disney." So we have to figure this out before ... - Always ask Google first. - Yeah, I know, soon it will just be Echo in the corner. - [Man's Voice] I got it. - Okay. - [Man's Voice] Acquisitioned by Disney. Disney announced on January 24, 2006 that it agreed to buy Pixar for approximately $7.4 billion in an all-out stock deal. Following Pixar's shareholder approval, the acquisition was completed May 5, 2006. From the Pixar wiki, if we trust that. - And you know who made the most money with that? Steve Jobs. - What? - Steve Jobs from Apple. - Oh, Steve Jobs, that's true. - He made all the money. But he owned most of Pixar. And where's that money now? - He fronted the money, of course. What do you mean? - Where's the money? Some of it here in LA, there's the daughter or the kids of Steve. Or whatever, the Bay Area. And they have 10, 20, whatever billion on a bank. - That's the sort of thing that makes you think like, late at night, you're like "There's people out there with billions. Where are they right now? Flying around." - Getting depressed. - Yeah. - Cause there's no ... - Eating $100 million sushi under the ocean. - There is no normal person you can talk to if you know, if you are walking around, "Yeah, I have 10 billion on a bank." And then you think, oh my god, you can make everything possible. You can go to Mars or you can make your own car company or buy everything you want. After a while that shit is deadly boring. And then nobody talks to you the normal way. - [Andrew] Yeah, that's true. - You have to lock yourself up and talk only with other billionaires. Oh, how fun is that? - I've heard you shouldn't ever want to be a billionaire because what you can do with a billion dollars is almost the same thing you can do with 10 million. But when you're a billionaire, the amount of attention you get is, makes your life unbearable. So it's better to be a lot smaller, you know. Not that it's a possibility for me, but (laughs). - [Ton] But you're thinking about it. - Yeah, this doesn't pay for itself. What do you think is stopping Blender from becoming the predominant software in the indus ... Like, you could be able to walk down to Disney or another studio, and everybody there is using Blender? How come they're not? - Yeah, but what is the dominant software? I mean ... - 3ds Max or Maya - But not if you walk into Disney, they don't use Max. - Well they have their own thing, yeah. - Yeah, they have their own things. But the smaller ones, the smaller studios at 20 to 50 people, that size, right? If they have VFX it's of course all Nuke. Nuke is fantastic for things. But for modeling, uh, for 3D, Blender you can see more often popping up over the - - In small studios. - But I don't think it's something that stops. I think it's a gradual evolution. Because... the... It happens now, little bit by little bit more and more and more. And suddenly there is a whole VFX studio and they're only using Blender for their 3D stuff. - Barnstorm, right? - Yeah. - Yeah I'm visiting them on Friday, should be fun. - Yeah, it's really fun. And it's insane, you see people using Blender and they're not complaining or so. They don't make a problem, they just click around and do their stuff. This is yup! And they do awesome things. Good artists, good software, and good product. - Is it just me, it feels like Blender very recently, the last two or three years, has reached, like, I don't know, the graph of adoption seems to be going exponentially more. Like, back in 2009, it was like very fringe group. Like if you mentioned to somebody that you used Blender and they're a 3D artist, a lot of people hadn't even heard of it. Whereas now, if you say Blender- - But after 2.5 and Sintel, that was the first leap. - Yeah, that was a leap. - And then suddenly... It was amateur, fun hobby, and suddenly, hey, this might be possible in production. And for me another big big milestone was SIGGRAPH 2013 or 14, when Pixar announced to support Blender with RenderMan. So they have the RenderMan plug-in and they only do that for three or four, four programs. So they have RenderMan for Maya, RenderMan for Houdini, RenderMan for ... I forgot. - Max? - And Blender. No, no Max. - Really? No way. - Houdini, Maya, Blender, and I forgot. - That's where I've noticed it. Is when you go to the third parties in the industry and you visit their website, like in the old days, if you look at like software supported, Blender was never on there. But now it's there. And it's quite, I'm like, "ooh." Like Evermotion, they started releasing some model packs now for Blender. And it's like, it's quite, things are changing. - But is that a purpose strategy? In a sense, right? I think the best thing of what we do with open-source is to keep it fairly feasible, simple, and stable. So you don't do risky stuff. If you would be a company, you know, that you run a business you suddenly have employees and people working. And you suddenly look at your monthly expense, and say, "Oh my God, shit. Every month, tens of thousands or 50,000 is going out. How am I going to pay everybody? I have to keep the company running and stuff." That happens for Cinema or the others, they have to make 10, 20 million per year. That means every month, they have to pay one million in costs, only. Every month! So what happens if suddenly they have 100 less users or so, or 200? It's "Oh my god, I have to fire people." And you get that whole stress. So a lot of the focus on the business is not so much on the product development. And in Blender I always try to have all of the focus on the product, software. The users; the bug fixing; keeping it stable; make sure that things are working; make sure that we are not going into 20 different directions; Finding the right people to help contributing. And setting a very gradual path and make sure that every step is always supported and feasible. And you can only do it if you do it more slow. Otherwise things would break. And once in a while you do a leap. That's for 2.5, we did a leap. And officially in open-source circles doing those kind of leaps are always failures. So no open-source project is advised to ever do a leap. Always do things gradual. - Really? - Yeah. So Blender survived one leap. It was unique, it was really unique. - Is it gonna survive the next leap? - We will find out next year. (They laugh) No, I think so, Blender 2.8 is going fantastic. - I think so. - It's going fantastic. And you saw it on SIGGRAPH, oh you were not there, but SIGGRAPH you had EEVEE, and EEVEE is... It's like... Oh my god, it's not only real time, it's Blender itself, it's the tool. You click on things, you move things around, you press Tab, it's edit mode, there's this. You can paint on it. You can move the lights around. It looks photo realistic, and it's real time, right? Finally, it's so good. - I know. - And then we didn't even start, there's so many other really good features coming in 2.8 Like the dependency graph, multi-threaded duplication, massive stuff, way more complicated scenes that stay interactive. Uhm... Multiple times in windows. They did one window playing Blender in animation and the other you can pose the character and you can see real time updates. That kind of stuff. And of course, the 101, uh, what I said. We are going to make a version of Blender which is reduced, and you can remove 95% of the features, and really try to configure things with nice, simple big buttons, and then make, for example, the first prototype we're going to make, a tool for people who use 3D printers. So you want to have a model, you have to clean it a little bit. I want to see the size. And then I'm gonna send it to the printer for print. - I'm quite skeptical of 101, because I heard an analogy, I mean tell me what you think about this, where they say like, you shouldn't ever simplify the software if the plan is to get them to use the original. Uhm, because like if you want to teach someone how to drive a car, you don't first of all give them a car with just a steering wheel and no pedals. Because then in the future, they're gonna be struggling with all the different things. - Come on, for kids, I've seen those toys with all the steering wheels. So that's why it's so difficult to use pedals down there. Maybe the analogy is not really the best, but. But I know what you mean. How can you decomplexify something in a useful way without taking away what it makes powerful. But I think, for Blender, we can do it now. Because if you look back from 2002 all the way 15 years later, the amount of stuff we added to Blender is insane. Even though it looks very gradual, the marker, but the amount of features and things Blender can do is really, really insane. It's getting out of control. So even when we want, we can't continue that way. There is no space in the UI, there is no space for the shortcuts. We can't handle it. We have to do something to reduce it, to specialize. That's what I said. Because as a sculptor, a modeler, you want to have advanced tools, but you don't need to see all the other stuff from the game people and the motion tracking people and the lighting and texturing people or so, right? So you gonna reduce from that 100%, you can go back to 30 or 20. And then optimize that. But every feature what you have left is still advanced. So it's not that you make it less good to sculpt. Of course not, sculpting stays fantastic. But you don't have all the other stuff on your way. I think for 3D printing, it can still be, you can have sculpting in it. For 3D print it's very nice to sculpt and have to do for 3D printing. And the combing, and the modeler can be there. And that's it. And you make a nice bigger tool bar with bigger icons so people can find the basic tools better. So that's what you can do in 101 or in 2.8, you can configure your UI entirely. And you can make a version of it only 10 materials, 10 models, and then you drag a model in a window and you see a monkey. And then you add the blue material on top of it and you have a blue monkey. And further, Blender wouldn't do anything. That's possible. That was my challenge for the coders. Is that useful? I don't know. But I want to try, right? Because if you read it, we have what we call the application template. It's a new concept in Blender. It's a template that also becomes an application. So there's a blend file, but it has the configuration of Blender. And then if you load that, you can get a complete different software, almost. - Yeah. - It's fun. - Yeah. - I want to see how that works. And it's an experiment, you only know ... - That's right, I agree. - You have to do it to fail, right? Or be a success. - You know what would be another cool experiment? If we made the left mouse click the default. - Oh, yeah... But that's already discussed a year ago. - Well, can you tell me what was the ... What was the outcome? - The whole thing for how do you want to configure Blender is going to get an overhaul. So if you start Blender for the first time you can get a very quick little questionnaire. There's just a button that says, well, "I want to... I'm a power user, I want to use the previous settings." Click, you get the old settings. Or say, "I'm a new user, and I want to learn Blender And I want to have the settings, one or two options." And that's how you can start. And for the new users, you should follow all the conventions, that's fine. But if you say, "No, I want to learn the tutorials from Blender.org." Then you can get a configuration. - That's gonna make my job quite hard. - But in principle, you can make your own application template on your website, and say, "Here, download Blender, but get my template." And then Blender becomes your Blender. - Oh, I don't know about that. I went to the ZBrush summit, and they were saying like, cause I tried learning ZBrush a little while ago, and it blew my mind just how poorly the interface was. And it's like it's ... - It looks so fun and stuff. Just (...) I never used it. - Oh yeah, it's very... it works just like real clay, it works just like real clay, but it's more complex than it needs to be. And everyone I spoke to at ZBrush is they say, "Yeah, but the default one is very tricky, but once you learn it for 5 to 10 years, you can make your custom-" - Ten years? - Yeah, custom interface. And I said ... - [Ton] 10 years, that's way too long. - That's the problem with ZBrush. Is that they haven't got a good default software. I think the software default is important. - There's an interface team and I said before you're welcome to Chung, and Jonathan is there and a couple of others. And they will make sure that we have a number of defaults. You cannot only have one because everybody's using computers in a different way. And for example with pen and tablet, you don't have a left or right mouse, you only have a click. And a hold click. And for them, you should be able to have, within one click, off you start Blender, to make Blender working for that. And that is similar to how you want to use Blender only with left click. Cause people only want to use left clicks and no right clicks, as they're not for selecting. You should have that configuration work from start, very well designed. But it doesn't mean that the concept of assigning selecting to a different mouse button is not bad or good, I think it's really good. And it saves you from mouse strain, especially if you use a little bit more fingers. If you only use one, I can use this only one, I have to switch mouse to the left hand. - Yeah, but it's the convention. - Yeah. - It's what everybody knows. - Yeah I know. That's right, uh. And especially for new users, left mouse select is very more convenient. And I think the main problem is not so much the default. Main problem is that people don't know how to find the default. And it is that the left click is still not as good as the right click. Because not everything works optimal if you configure it. And that's what we have to solve. - Yeah ... I think it could be solved more easier than it sounds though. Like I remember Sebastian made a video explaining why the right click was better and- - Superior, it was totally superior. - But everything that he mentioned could solved just by holding down Control, you know? It doesn't have to be right or left. It's like, make it left, but if you wanna select that other thing, it's Control left. I don't know, I feel like it's not ... - And think - we have tablets nowadays and tap-pads and those things, we have to look out for where does it go to or how long are we keep using the mouse. You use a tablet yourself? - Yeah. - Sometimes? With Blender? - No. Oh, oh for sculpting, yeah. - Okay. But then I think the tablets are very nice interfaces. And that's what we have to make work. So yeah, of course we work on it. - Uh uh... So I'm allowed to contribute to the interface, am I? - [Ton] Of course. - I thought I was expelled from the discussion. - Make mock-ups, come with designs, ideas. See what other people are doing, of course. - It's a lot of politics in interface, isn't it? - Nah. - No? - Nah, it's... Okay, I mean the politics part is that you should collaborate and look at what other people are doing. And not trying to push one thing as the truth. If you start having discussions on that levels as people say, "Yeah, but everybody ..." Or, "The market standard is ... ... and that's why we ...". That's always confusing discussions, because we will never agree on those things. So if you can better look at it, it's okay... so how can you create the optimal workflow for Blender users? So how does it work? What are the things to make sure that their experience is optimal, that they can work fast, and that they have a good, ergonomic workflow? Those kind of discussions are more useful. If you agree on that level, then you can say, "Okay, we have a nice design, but it is not standard. And so that means that people have to learn it." And not everybody likes to do that. Some people say, "I don't want to learn anything new. I want to copy what I know from Maya or Max or another program, and I want Blender to reward that behavior", right? But then I do ALT click for viewpoint rotate in Maya and that has grown onto me and I want to keep using that. And of course we should... That's what 2.8 is meant to do, to make sure that those kind of configurations are advanced and stable and keep working. And then the whole discussions about the default is not so interesting anymore. Cause it's more like okay, what kind... which of the defaults are you using? "I'm using the Cookie default." "Oh, but I used the Guru default, way more fun." Maybe it goes that way. - [Andrew] But... - But one, we can have one default it's good, of course we should have a minimum, the minimum configuration, that's what I think. What I like about Maya, for example, if you'd install it, we did it once, to the educational version, and the default key map in Maya is minimal. It hardly has anything configured, especially shortcuts. Everything works based on using menus. If you see Maya tutorials, it's often that you see people click. Click and then you have a tool, do something. Click click click click. And that's a bit slow, but it's a good mode to learn things. Cause you first have to learn how to navigate in the software. So where are all the options? Where is this, where's the editing? Where are the fluids properties? Where are the ... right? And if you reveal that with shortcuts, all the little icons and stuff, then you forgot, because you cannot remember 1,000 icons. You can only remember a few. Because it doesn't work, icons. But those lists of menus, they are quite well to navigate. If you keep them, "File", "Import", everybody knows that. You see it once and you can find it again. "Edit", "View", right? We have a couple of standard concepts. Okay, I want to set the view to camera. "View" ... Oh, "Camera" ... Yeah, right? That's the navigation thing they present. I think that's what we will try for the 2.8. Default, or the... one of the defaults to make sure that there are maybe 20, 30, 50 shortcuts, that's it. And for the rest, use the menus. Use the buttons. - The thing that I'm most like worried about, is like the UI team is made up of power users, right? Like most of them have been using Blender for 10 years or so and so therefore, it's, you know... It's human nature to lean towards what you're most used to. And most Blender users are used to conventions which aren't in any other software. And so I wonder like if ... - But most Blender users are Blender users. - [Andrew] Oh no, not that old thing again. - I know, so a half of the Blender users use Blender already for more than a year or two or three. So you're more talking about new people, new users. - Yes, beginners So I wonder who has the voice of the beginners? So who has the voice of the beginner? - But you can't make a beginner who never used 3D software before, you put him in charge of designing interfaces. - Yeah, but they know that left click is select. - How do they know? They don't know nothing. - Because Windows, Microsoft, Mac. It's a convention. - They click a button as it works. - A what? - Okay, I don't... I'm not going to argue with you on the left or the right click. I'm fine with left click select. But I'm not going to give up the right click. But as an option, right? You have to give people the option to configure things and we want to present that. You can say, "Well here is the training wheels Blender" to get on board and learn things quick, you can use this configuration, the default for new people. And there are a number of configurations for the power users and people who use Blender already for longer. And they want to type and work really fast. And they don't mind having a P that runs a game engine. - Yeah, yeah. - I don't know, probably not. So... Yeah and how much time... Yeah, I mean about the politics in the group of contributors. I mean, there is a level of politics, and that's of course me, right? I'm the boss. - The head man. - Yeah. I'm the benevolent dictator... - Dictator. - For life, BDFL. So because I started this whole thing and I have a couple of credits on board, still, because I made it happen and I maintained it, and I prove that I'm not always wrong, right? I'm often right, I have a good sense of keeping things work. So, that gives me some credit. And I think it's good for a online community, for people who are involved in Blender, if they know that there's one person who can decide, who's consistent and relatively predictable and who's on board for the continuity and not for making himself more wealthy or, right? Because Blender and me are one, right? This is my life. This is the biggest thing I ever did. I don't think I'll do anything bigger. - It'll be your legacy, yeah. That's your legacy. - So it's important. So I'm conservative in that sense. And even though you say politics, if you don't agree with Ton, you've got a problem. Yeah, that's true, right? But if you work for Apple and you don't agree with the company, then what do you want, right? Uhh... But it's not too difficult to disagree with me. I'm, in some aspects I'm strong, and I say, "Well this is what we keep, modality, ... cutting Blender in small windows and having them pop up with requesters." I had to fight over that forever. Now, everybody says this is the right decision. But 15 years ago, it was a discussion topic. Or the file format. Blender is saving blend files and loading it. I mean you know from other programs that saving and loading, that can take a while, right? Blend files are nowadays fast. And, but I had to fight for that, really. So you can have one second load of a complete project. It's an important feature. But for most software developers, it's not. They want to have XML, and you get like Maya files. And then a big project in Maya would take like one or two minutes to open. So that's fun, right? But that kind of things, you can discuss that. And we had those discussions. Very heated, big discussions on changing the file format to make it more accessible for everyone, to make XBML because the whole industry is doing it. And I said no, right? - So that's why it's so fast for Blender. - But also I have a couple of principles. So like that the Blender should not have an installation requirement. So you can still have Blender for Windows on a sticky, put it in your laptop, anyone's computer. And you start it and it will run. That's important. It means that we will not change somebody's computer and you can keep it local and work and that it works across platforms. There's a lot of benefits for that. And Blender should start within a second. Gets a bit slower nowadays, but we have to bring it back. It's important, the software should not, you should not wait. Why would you wait for software? - Yeah, I'm amazed at how slow, yeah a lot of software is to boot. Photoshop. - I don't mean that those kind of political things if you're going to talk to me about making Blender's file format XML, that I'm a bit tired of that. That kind of topics is past, right. We don't go over that. The left mouse and right mouse discussion, uh, you can laugh about that, right? Because I like to work with people who say, "Okay, I can see economical reasons to do this and I think it's a fast workflow." But it's a bottleneck for the new people to come onboard. Right? Now, you think that's right? - Yeah. - Now, then we have it a deal! So how complicated is that? But some people are like, "Oh, it's the most stupid thing on the planet, and you are idiots." Then it doesn't work. So we talk to someone on a normal level and then it doesn't matter if you are a power user or a new user. I would also welcome a software developer on board, who's specialized in UI usability, working on the Blender interface. - Is there anyone that's been in contact with you? - Not enough. I think for 2.5 we had, for example, Matt Ebb From Australia. William Reynish, they were good guys. - Is Matt Ebb still work with Blender? - No, not anymore, he's doing Houdini. The Lego movies, for example. - Oh, right, okay. That's why I haven't heard. - And William is sometimes available and he might come back to do things. But he did a good job on 2.5. And I want to make sure that we have a high quality UI. Because the others are not sitting still, even though Autodesk is not very innovative. But you get small companies doing new stuff, certainly like The Foundry, and Yukimoto, and others. But you also have Algorithmic, Substance Painter's, Substance Designer's, they're good tools. You use them? - Yup. - And they are nice designed I think. They are well done. - But not as good as Blender's node groups. - No? - No. - [Ton] What do you mean? - In Substance Designer, like if you create this complex, crazy texture sort of system, and then you need to duplicate a part of it, like you want to take this setup with these 10 nodes ... - And reuse it? - And you want to reuse it, there's no way to link duplicate it. Whereas Blender, you create a group. And I'm like, what? And I was talking with one of the other guys that works with us. And he was like, he started using Substance. He's like, "Yeah, the node groups, it needs node groups like what Blender has." - But on the other hand, what you can do with Substance is brilliant. - Yeah, it is. - And all procedural, and you make a layer, they did a bit of Photoshop interface to map things and then you can create superior textures that look so good. And then you bake it and you export, I mean, that's a workflow. But apart from that, I think they did a good job on the UI. - Oh yeah. - For it. It feels pleasant, it's modern, it's flat too. Subdivisions again. - That's true, yeah. - Parts they did a couple of good jobs on previews, the browsing, and how they present things. Well done. - Yeah, yeah. - And that kind of level of design is we need on board. - [Andrew] Is when what? - We need that kind of designers who can work on that level And that's not that, it requires experience. - [Andrew] Yeah, it's a hard job. - So I'm collecting money for that. - You're not collecting money. - [Ton] I'm collecting money for that. - Oh, to hire a UI guy. - One of the first questions was how many people are working for the Blender Institute. So we have currently, as it goes up and down, between 8 and 12 and that depends on what kind of project we do. They're not all developers, of course, half of them is artists. But how many people are working on Blender paid as developer? For either Foundation, because we give out grants, for those that are not employees, Or the Institute? It's currently 8, I think. - That's pretty good. - Yeah. And I think it goes back to 10. And it depends... You don't count me, there, because I'm not working on Blender. I'm doing- - Emails. - Yeah, email. (laughs) Doing interviews. - Yeah, those too. - So there's 8 to 10, and that's only growing, we're talking. And there is from the Market, what you said, you noticed that things are getting maybe exponential but it's going up. I also note that when I talk to studios and companies, they have Blender in the picture, and they think: "Yes, yes, we're going to try. And we're going to support the Blender Institute. We're going to have some support. Or we want to find out how to get Blender more efficiently in our companies." So what the bottleneck here is support and services companies. Everybody wants me to do that, to do support. But come on. - Support services? - Support services. - Oh. - What Canonical does for Ubuntu. Or Red Hat for Linux. - That's a commercial opportunity for someone, isn't it? - Ha ha, you can make billions with it. Go ahead, please do it. - So that, you mean like companies need someone to call on the phone? - Yup yup yup. - Yeah. - But also, hey, we have a character, but the right arm is twitching in a specific shot. Fix it. - Right. - You do that? No. - If we had a team, yeah, you make money, yeah. - Yeah, but you need the people, you need to organize that and how do you do that. It's a special type of work. - There was, wasn't Sebastian trying to- - Yeah, they tried, but ... - Didn't work. - The time is not ready. It's a chicken egg thing. Because if you would have this company that would have support with the contract and even when it's not 24/7 phone line but when it's only 10 hours per day on weekdays, still, if you can phone or make... have a chat thing and you can send them priority things to fix, it would work. - Yeah, I think so. - Yeah, it would really work. And I even asked a couple of other servicing companies what kind of business model they have behind it. And it's not too complicated. Uh, for example, the character with the arm doing weird. You can have a service contract that says that if you cannot solve it, you don't get paid. - Ahhhhh. - Pretty fair. - That is fair, yeah. - Equal thing because you get this thing in and then you say okay we look at it. No, we don't do it; we can't fix it. Sorry we can't, we tried but we can't. Now we don't have to get paid. - [Andrew] That's a good idea. - Oh, yeah, we can fix it. It will cost you 1,000. - "Okay, fix." So that's not a bad business, but you need to be commercial for that and you need to be interested in money. - Well maybe this can... Talk to the camera and say hey, we got a (laughs). There's enough people that are starting up Blender render farms, aren't they? We don't need another render farm. - I don't know why they do that. They're nerds, they like computers. We need people who like people and people who like to do business. - [Andrew] Support companies. - But you like business, you have employees. - Yeah, but I'm busy with the Poliigon. - Yeah. How big is Poliigon now? - 10 people. - 10? - Yeah. - Full time? - Pretty much, yeah. - And they're all working at their own locations. - Yeah, mostly Canada, yeah. - [Ton] In Canada? - Yeah, for some reason. They're all in Vancouver. - Vancouver? - Yeah! It wasn't planned but, it was like one in Tennessee and ... - So Poliigon is getting bigger than Guru. - Yeah, it's like more than twice the revenue, yeah. - But Poliigon is neutral, right? It is the texture system for ... - Yeah, so it's open to 3ds Max, Maya, yeah. - But can you see that in the... Do you have questionnaires so people can tell you what kind of software they use? - We should but we don't. We don't have the user data yet. But ... - No click estimate or ... - We could, I guess we could pull something from the help docs but it's very rudimentary. So in 2018 we're adding models to the site. So we will have support for 3ds Max, Maya, Octane, all the major renderers and the major software. And so we'll have, like data then on who downloads what so that would be the information, but... - [Ton] Good business. But I talk around you, if you ever meet people who say, "Ah, this Blender thing..." or "What can I do for that?" "What kind of business is needed?" For people who like to organize stuff, especially for support and services, people who know other people. You can use the Blender network for that. It's an open system. Everybody can see everybody who's there. They're all available. And you should be an in-between, an intermediate between the customer requests and all the professionals out there. And then you simply find the right solutions for people. And if you know, "Ah, this is a problem, and then that person can fix it", that's worth gold, really. Because most people have no idea. You don't even have an idea. If you have a problem in Blender, you don't know how to fix it. - And I got a Twitter. - Yeah, you put it on Twitter. - (laughs) That's what I use Twitter for. It's a great help desk. But yeah, somebody should make an Uber. You can connect the right artist with the solution. - That's the Uber Blender. - Yeah. (they laugh) - That's a great idea. - Million dollar idea, yeah, cool. Well, you've got to shoot off. You've gotta go to an Agent 327 meeting. - Somehow my super watch thinks that I'm doing a dynamic workout. - Maybe you moved your arms too much. - I'm talking too much with energy. - Well, good luck with that agent. - You got all the info. - Yeah, yeah yeah. Thank you very much Ton. - It was exciting. - Yeah.

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 1,141,557

Keywords: blender, interview

Id: qJEWOTZnFeg

Length: 106min 51sec (6411 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 26 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/philips4350]

This is one of the chillest interview I’ve ever seen ,Andrew really is a great interviewer

[u/gynoplasty]

Have you guys heard the word about golem project?

It's a distributed blender computing network. And you get paid for your contribution. I've been using it for a while and it is pretty easy on Windows with the GUI and on my Ubuntu server too.

Thought I'd spread the word as I'm a crypto shill

r/golemproject

[u/Source_platform]

This video sheds some interesting light on the Open Source industry. We definitely agree with Ton that money is simply a means for the creativity and ambition to create which drives OS. This is the core ideology that we have kept close and have always revisited when building Source.
Money is quite the touchy topic in regards with OSS however it is necessary for people to be able to commit time to their passion. Similar to how film makers, painters, musicians, etc all (or almost all) sell their creations in order to keep creating, there needs to be a system for OSS to funnel value to its creators. This video itself shows that clear as day when it mentioned its sponsor Poliigon.
Essentially, Open Source cannot rely solely on donations to keep afloat. That is simply unsustainable. And not to mention ads. I personally believe that they have no place in the community. We've been developing a system which we believe is the solution and are in need of beta testers and contributors.

[u/[deleted]]

This is so beautiful

[u/BrianTheballoon]

I have trouble understanding him