 Okay, can people hear me? Yes? Okay So the technology is not perfect here I have a presentation prepared with lots of videos and videos also come with sound so you have to Imagine the fantastic soundtracks and the sounds that you are hearing Maybe I'll talk a little bit through the films and we'll see how it goes. I will improvise a little bit So I wanted to start showing before I will say anything a little clip With the fantastic soundtracks, with music Okay, well This was my talk in one minute So what I'm going to talk about is The story of Blender, how Blender became of age But then there's actually a very very old project that started in 94 In 94, I hired a small studio in Eindhoven in the south of the Netherlands And in that studio, we were making computer graphics and animation video graphics We called it mostly and we did some 3D as well And I started to redesign our in-house software Which we were using for rendering and some modeling and I thought let's call it Blender And this picture what you see here is the oldest backup I could retrieve So you can see Blender.C and Blender.H has January 2, 94 as a date stamp That's the official birthday of Blender So in the studio of our company, we made mostly Models of buildings or product presentations And all the things that were not really doing film or animation with characters What you see here is a reel, what we did in the 92 to 96 period And everything you see has been made with Blender or with our own software, what we had in that time So, 25 years old Rock For clients like who wanted to have a video business or video tapes Because in the 90s every self-respecting business had a video Right? And then you had a client coming in and you put a video in the recorder And you showed them the corporate video You can imagine this is in the same period as Toy Story 1 was being made and released in 95 And of course we were looking up to this Hollywood Because they had much bigger computers and much bigger, better software than we had But in the end, what you see here is all made with software that runs on 2, 4 megabyte computers But in the end, we had 8 megabytes to do things in And that was a limit of the complexity that you could achieve And it's really, at the final years of the company I was the founder and the owner of NEO CEO You could see that the video business would go down People didn't want to have corporate videos anymore But instead the internet was coming up and of course games were coming up And I decided to add game creation tools in the Blender environment So that people could create a complete game in the tool and then export it to For example, the PlayStation So we had an official developer kit And what you see there is just a game prototype What you could make and play in Blender on the Silicon Graphic system And then export it into one little Blender file which you could load on the PlayStation And then play the game with the player there We tried to do business with that but nobody believed in it And everybody said, yeah, cool technology But what's the game? This is the game demo, this is not a real playable game So I decided to sell the company's goodwill and clients to another business And I took the software to a startup center in the University of Eindhoven But I thought Blender was much cooler than the business I had making video graphics or games So I founded the company, not a number And with not a number, it was a one-man company You could see the room there as I was sitting, that was all we had The first thing I did was writing a manual and selling it to get some money in And the business idea was to give away the software for free But not as open source But the software was the least for everyone, for free Then very quickly we did the 3BSD port first We did Linux port, we got help to get the windows port working We did the C key, which was a little extension that you could extra features in Blender And we went to a share graph to show what we are doing And at that time, maybe all the people that will remember That was the days of the internet bubble And in 2000, I couldn't resist I was told a one-man company with an intern, that was all And then people were coming to me and I told, your business is worth 10 million Then we buy 40% of the shares for a 4.5 million investment Well, why not, right? So let's try this So in 2000, I suddenly had a company with more than 40 employees In three, four months, from one to 40 Trying to do something and conquer the market with The concept of having freeware, software and commercial services around this Well, as you know how it went in those days, it was burning money It was burning money, creating shareholder value All the games that Silicon Valley is also playing is what we tried to do And this didn't end well The company shut down, it got bankrupt, it restarted for a little while And then in 2002, the investors told me, Tom, Blender is now going here In the drawer, we will lock it, and it's now ours You go and do something else with your life I'm not going to do something else with my life, right? I want to continue with this Blender project So I set up a foundation, they don't offer a Blender foundation And I could get a couple of the Blender websites back, because they were under my name And not in the investor's hand And I launched a plan to buy back the rights of the software to make it open source The original rights were still of the investors at that time But they would agree on making Blender free software If we would collect via the community 100,000 euros After some negotiation, the investors agreed Because nobody would ever pay more for the software than we could To my shock and surprise, we made it in seven weeks And we did this all based on principles that were called at that time Not crowdfunding, but it was called the street performer protocol And this is the basis of what Kickstarter and Indiegogo started on later Because we already used pledges Like if you say, well, if you made a target of 100k, then you have to pay And we had multiple levels, people could step in with extras It was a traditional crowdfunding There's a great article from this scientist about our historical crowdfunding Freak success or first-of-a-trump Well, in a way, Blender was a freak success Because it never happened again I've been contacted a lot by companies who went bankrupt And then the user said, hey, you want to buy back the code How did you do this? How can we do this? And it never happened And to my knowledge, it was never a community who could buy back the software And actually the main reason is because I'm too stubborn to accept other people's code So when I made Blender, there was nothing external There was no module, there was nothing normal engineering practices of making software I wrote everything myself So the IP of Blender was fully owned by the company If you go to other programs like Lightwave, or you had the Softimage And other 3D programs that stopped The community would love to buy it back But the companies don't own the products that they were using Closed modules and closed libraries They assembled the software which they had the right to sell But they don't own it Anyway We had a first Blender conference and we released Blender as open source in 2002 With the help of the Free Software Foundation in Europe Loic, I don't know if Loic is anywhere, but thanks Free Software Foundation for the support It was a big step to convert a closed source development environment to a public system Then in the period after that I had to set up an open source project Which was new for me I knew of course how open source works, what the principles are But how do you manage projects online? How do you work with communities? How do you make decisions? What do people really like? One of the things that helped really well was me really stepping back a bit I focused on the business Making sure that there was another book published saying So I could work on Blender full time But I let decisions and management and this Progress on Blender development I left it to the community For example, there was a two hopu tree If there are Finnish people here, they know why it's called two hopu It's an evil tree There was a fork of Blender where everybody had access to Everybody If you wanted to have an idea, just put it in the software And after three months it was so unstable that we could replace it with another version But that works fantastic There's a threshold for people to come on board The other thing that the community showed Which was so strong Is they really work on the things that matter for them And I'm the person from the corporate background a little bit With a vision and I go, wow, I want to make games And I want to have a tool where you have interaction And linear content creation all together in one Which is still a great idea But maybe 20 years later now it's getting a little bit more feasible to do that So instead developer said, great idea Tom But why don't we first fix the modeler? Why don't we first fix the material system And get better texture and better sampling and Blender So they really focus on the things that matter And that matter for the users And that kind of open source dynamics is what I really appreciated and learned from That was in the first few years we did a Blender 2.3 release Which had a big improvement on the UI already It became a little bit more usable So then in 2005 I was ending up with an open source project And even though I love to work with people and this dynamics of the community I also noticed that there was something missing And the typical open source projects tend to become very technical And a little bit anti-user oriented Developers like to develop and like to have fun And users are sometimes kept separately And for my background I was, because Blender was in our software I was always used to have the software The users and developers working together on things And specifically for Blender because it's a 3D tool It is essential that you do this You have to get the creatives to influence How that happens with the technology and how to make it usable So that's why I thought let's start a project With Mr. Orange where we invite the best 5-6 creatives From the Blender community to Amsterdam And let them make a compelling, interesting, great animation from And inspire that way the community of developers online To catch up with development for them To have this day-to-day interaction And that became Elephant Stream The world's first open movie with a fantastic soundtrack So we were so proud when we made this If you look back to it now, the animation is a bit clunky And it looks a bit weird and stuff But don't forget this was so amazing That we could get from the previous reel Because mostly cameras were going around in 3D models We suddenly had animated characters with voices And we were acting and we're telling an interesting weird story So for us Elephant Stream is a milestone And not only because of the process of working with the developers While we are making the film But also because we released it at Creative Commons And we didn't release the film only at Creative Commons We released everything From the storyboards, to the textures, to the scripts To the test versions, to the deleted scenes To the whole production database of the studio was released And we could fund that by selling that on a dual box DVD Where the film was on But also you could put it in your computer And it had all the blender files and the software You get every shot, load it, render it yourself and sense it And that model worked fantastic to share content And to share the technology at the same time So I thought it's time to do something more permanent I want to have a studio again And I want to have a place where you can put developers and artists together On projects to push blender further So I found this little place In the docklands of Amsterdam's old warehouse There was a bankrupt company We still had all this crap going there I could rent it quite cheap And to say, well, this is where we're going to work And make movies and work on blender projects With our main business model, DVDs Just put data on DVDs Which is open source data But you just sell the distribution And do crowdfunding for more films For example, Big Buck Bunny That was the first film we did in the blender institute And now production level really kicked in Big Buck Bunny, I think people have seen Big Buck Bunny Did you see Big Buck Bunny? I think of all our open movies Big Buck Bunny has the most views And hits on YouTube of all the films we ever did And that goes into the hundreds of millions Because it's a creative commons People pick it up, put it on their own channel Slap advertisement on it And get 10 or 20 million hits It's fine, right? Go ahead, do it Here's a little clip As you can see Character animation quality and rendering quality improved a lot The expression of characters was fantastic Better deformation, especially hair Systems, furry animals were completely hot And big in those days All the animation studios were doing furry animals So if you want to do furry animals in blender as well It's horrible We were accused in those days Of promoting violence, right? Somebody called the genre of our movies Open source violence, right? Of course this is cartoon, right? In cartoon movies you have to do things to make people laugh And it was a big success for us So we're moving on The blender institute was doing well And the software development projects are getting bigger I could hire a couple of people Because of our DVD sales and training, what we did So I thought, okay, it's time for the big leap Our people who work in open source communities Have they all confirmed to you That doing a big leap is a dangerous thing Usually it doesn't work And the communities like to have smaller targets If you tell people, let's do something And then release it next week Everybody will say, yeah, right? That's awesome, we can do something And release it maybe next month But if you say, let's do something And then you work on it for three years Maybe five Then people will say, why would I do that? That's not really inspiring To have these kind of big targets On the other hand, for Blender It was essential to do a couple of things To upgrade the UI And to have more modern interaction With the software That is called the non-modal parallel workflow For example, this is how Blender 2.5 looked like The software became not only visible More modern But also a pleasure to work with Because everything kept working For example, you have your menu popping up It still could do the preview renders in the back Which was threaded And it could update the viewports So everything was done And developed in a way That it always would keep working Whatever you do Even when you type a text in a button Everything in the UI stays responsive And that makes working with the software Much more pleasure And this is standard menu stuff Nowadays have, so Blender needed it As well Meanwhile, we had Sintel coming Sintel was at that time The biggest ambitious project we did And we ended up with a fantastic story With a real script like that With a young director Who's a genius, he's fantastic So we spent much attention to the story development And it really became the darling Of open source films Especially when the film was taken down A couple of years ago by Sony Accidentally because they had Some music club going on Like they won't have it for this version But Sony took it down It was for four or five days The talk of the internet Finally we found out that people Really, really appreciated this film Of course it had lots of views online But it was considered to be part of Our free culture It is a free culture movie Because it's open source And we share everything as we usually do And people close their hearts And it looked fantastic It was such a nice film Where we show that with open source software With the community to help us out It's normal people, great artists But just people like you and me Can make a film like that Okay, move around At that time what I would like to note In 2011 we started the Blemmer Network Because there was certainly more interest For professionals to use Blemmer And the Blemmer Network was a website Where people could connect And also offer services Because everybody who's using Software always says Especially for open source That is nice, it's free But where can I get the support Where can I have somebody to explain To me how it works Or where can I get help When I have a book and I want to have it fixed Or how can I get a new feature in Blemmer Or somebody make me a script All of that is what people Can get access to via the network Because the Blemmer organization Is way too small to do all this support And we have a worldwide community They should do all that business Then I can focus on making movies And working on the software Another big milestone in 2011 Was our render engine Cycles This is the senior Blemmer developer Brecht van Lommel He took a break And after half a year he came back And said, look at what we have here And that was Cycles This is a retracer Doing physically based rendering High quality rendering Using surface definitions As they have to call it That are actually representations Of how light scatters on surfaces It's a formula for light distribution Between surfaces So you can use that for retracer To create photo realistic effects And suddenly technology was far enough To run through CPUs And multi-training and CPUs That you could also have retracing And this high quality rendering To be part of a 3D program And have it in the viewport That was real-time almost So that's what we combined with another film That is Teasa Steel Not only we used Cycles For photo realistic rendering What you need for visible effects films That was motion tracking Somebody moves That you can have an eye And then put a motor on it or something That camera reconstruction is important Because you want to have Based on footage You want to know where is the photo camera So I can act like monsters And achieve to walk around Masking, compositing All things you need to do for visual effects So this was a sci-fi film Playing in Amsterdam The last of mankind has been Locking themselves up in an old shirt Getting attacked by evil robots Who were taking over the world And fighting with their last bits of hope Was it online? Was it online? So at that time we were going to 2013 And I thought let's have A feature film project Because there were now small studios Around the world using them From America to Australia All the way And let's see if you can create some kind of network And make a relay move for you Everybody makes a path And the production moves to the next studio That was at Gooseberry The funding target was also extreme We needed a lot of people To support this To be able to do this And we did a two month campaign And we didn't make it In our interest And motivation in the community To do something at this scale So that didn't work But what did work were two other milestones One was we started for this initiative To blend the cloud But instead of having data on plastic And do business with that People want to have it online And accessible So why would you want to have all your Open source creative commerce data On a piece of plastic We made a website with gigabytes Of data of the whole history Of the blended studios And people could get access To that for $10 per month Not only they would get Access to the old films But we would use that Subscription model to fund The next films as well That's how we did Cosmos Longromat 2015 Which was another level Up in quality for rendering And with the style And with the direction And everything And this really got us The industry including people from ILM And they just need to Look at what we are doing I could almost do the dialogue myself Cosmos Longromat is of course online You should watch it We are currently investigating Cosmos Longromat 2 And it's the second part Where this can become Open source series Like a TV series But then I was done With open source software And in this scene The guy with orange hair Slides to convince the sheep That he is so much more Than I see You can get a much better line For if you can have a little Device on his neck and You should watch it It's beautiful So this little reel Is something that is very popular Online in the Venom community This is a breakdown It shows how It works in the studio To use 3D software To make parts of the movies You see experiments and tests One of the highlights of Cosmos Longromat Is a big colorful tornado That comes down Picks up the seat You can see a lot of attempts And also went to simulation technology That's very popular On universities to have long students Working on open source libraries For fluid simulation For smoke simulation For air simulation For glass, for wind Everything that's part of Natural phenomena Part of a good 3D environment Another film we did in 2015 Was the comedy film The Lama Cutting into some kind of fight With opinion You want to see how it ends? You can go alone And as if it was nothing I thought especially I want to have that feature film anyway So we are going to do it in a different way Instead of working with A lot of small studios around the world Let's try to get something built In our own place in Amsterdam I spent the business with a film studio To make an open source pipeline For production A complete 100% free Open source pipeline for Make animation films Based on Blender of course And with other tools I got the rights of a famous Dutch comic series It's also quite well known in Belgium and in Germany This is the agency 327 Is a Dutch spy It's an international budget He's in Holland But there are lots of international Conspiracies Of people who come to Amsterdam To get stuff done So it's adventurous and comedy Target audience a little bit more Than commute Because we really like to explore Making animation films For a more adult audience This project Was fantastic Just like a commercial feature film And I was busy and ready To go around the world and sell it To get funding for it But something else happened And that of course was planned at 2.8 There was another big leap scheduled Already since 2014 Is to grab Blender to another level To really look at Industry compatibility Easier ways to configure it Workflow as a main theme And having Real-time photo realistic work In a viewport And so that you work on things Just like you have a modern game Engines that are looking almost Photo realistic You should be able to work Create things in an environment As if it looks real And that's what Modern 3D software does And another innovation That made Blender important To the Jose de Cunis pencil You will see a little demo of that later Where you can draw in 3D Not first when people Thought of what Why would I draw in 3D Well, it's It's what storyboard is like But also fashion designers Car designers Character, grizzly designers But if you can draw it very well And you can use 3D lines in your environment You can do crazy things All of this Project for 2.8 It went way, way too slow It was driving on and on and on And I thought maybe it's better To drop this feature film for a little while And focus on organizing 2.8 better So we did Another interesting campaign We had a little rocket token With a USB driver And we sold 3200 Wackets for 14 euros each In like, within two weeks And that gave us Some sponsors from the Corporate sponsors From the market gave us money To get all the core developers From Blender for three months To come to Amsterdam To get this whole 2.8 project Working And we got room A big studio in Amsterdam And this is Me calling around Showing the place If you are in Amsterdam You want to drop by Let us know because we always like to have Short tours, 5 minutes maybe But it's a fun place to see That's a result we could make A Blender 2.8 project at least In that summer 2018 The first beta version Was usable But things were slowing down Again, because everybody went back home And could notice That we were missing a really A core team of people Who worked together to do more complicated things So I thought We have to reorganize The way how we do donations And that's when we started The Blender Development Fund Which is a Membership program A little bit inspired by Liddice Foundation It has badges for users People can do small donations every month And you get a badge that shows up When you post things on the website But also with a corporate membership program With A little bit of added benefit Such as that You can directly email me Or you get a Blender developer contact That can help you To get better onboarded But the goal of the development fund Is solely to fund core development And do all the backend stuff Like book fixing, patch reviewing And making releases When 2019 started Like with a bang We got the annual award Within the animation industry The annual award is top This is the best award What they give to Software companies Or to people who do technology Or fireworks awards And we had the award with us To the Blender conference And people could have a little Glamour photography Making a picture with the award We also worked on a feature film A short film Called Spring Which was in development When 2.8 Was also being developed So the artists were using Every day Of master With all the bugs and all the issues And giving feedback on the usability And the stability of the software Because Spring is a beautiful Poetics fairy tale About a girl who has to bring Spring to the world I can only Advise you to watch it With good sound at your Home cinema We also have prepared A little clip with the The breakdown of how things work I think I'm running out of time So I'm going to skip this part Another thing happened last year That was the epic one The epic announced that they had 1.2 million dollars Reserved for Blender And I don't have it on the bank This is given in small parts Over a three years time Which is better for us Of course, Epic wants us To help Than the more professional Developing Developing more professional for Blender That means that They do better onboarding More engineering practices And that kind of thing And then we did the 2.8 Blender And this is what you see The 3D drawing tools That you can do in Blender You can do the animation on the bank You can do all 3D models And convert them into 3D The Blender Development Fund Like exploded with 5 times More animations Per year time The Blender Development Fund Is going to a million dollars Over a million dollars per year And it's only growing So yes We won, right? Everybody likes Blender Everybody wants to be an involved Blender But what does that mean for us The next transition going on In the Blender community And in the Blender organization That suddenly Because corporate Contributors are coming onboard They have a different way of working So how do we avoid Separating the community This is important for Blender From the professionals The professionals say I don't mind Having a paid bug tracker And then you can have a bug tracker But I would like to find ways to have The industry not saying Join us I'm going to be part of the industry I want the industry to be part of The Blender project So I would like to close with A question Which I was asking myself last year as well Like why do people use Blender When I'm here at an open source conference But I think the answer will surprise you For example I was at an ANC Conference Lots of young people there People 18, 19, 20 years They were all looking at me Apparently they knew me as an old Blender And they were all like oh wow Tom We love Blender, we use it as school We use it everywhere Even though our teachers don't use it We are using it But why are you using it Because you are young And you can get any cracked and hacked Whatever you want Well they said it is because Of the community The community is what Ties us So the community Is why they are using it It means if you go online And you want to know anything of Blender You find out The community Everything on 3D Is about Blender Everything is public and people share The community spirit to do that I have to hurry up I also asked the same question to professionals The studio was using Blender And they said We use Blender because You guys care And that is why we care Open source makers care We care about the product We care about the users And we care about things And the last thing That is why I was telling the story And people like to be Involved with stories And that is the final slide This is a famous brand Diagram, the golden circle And it says if you make a product The what Then you first have to look at The why, why are people doing this And open source Is not in the core But the open source is the how And open source is how People Connect with technology That was it, thank you