 Hello, everyone. I'm Dalai. We're going to talk a little bit about development, but for non-developers. Try to make things interesting, spice up a little bit, some personal tales. I'm not Jama. Sorry about that. Love his work. I'm the first one that was looking for it to see his work. But let's try to make something out of this. I've been using Blender since 2005. It's an archivist in there. It's a Python development, working films, research presented at SIGGRAPH, drones flying, full domes projected to get particles, cosmic particles projected for people dancing, books, and among all of this is connected to Blender. I've been using Blender for so many times. It has been paying my bills for so long. And as a developer, it's been 11 years since my first patch landed into master. And so many things happened since then. At the time I was doing Blender game engine, the little part of Blender which I liked. And from there, I got myself involved with 2.80, Blender as a whole. So I would like to share a little bit about that. So Blender 2.80 was just something that all the old users could just come in, get on board, and do amazing work as they used to do before. But we also really welcome new users, people that have never, ever, ever used Blender before. And I say, oh my God, things are so fast, so easy to learn now. The UI, the UX, everything just clicks, everything just works. And we took Blender that could do already so many things. And out of the sudden, we can keep doing more things. We can do more I.O., a Linux better supported, grease pencil, so many things. And the scope of what we accomplished with 2.80, what we all accomplished with 2.80, it's really beyond the shyest vision I think that don't have years ago. And we got there, we made it. When you do talk about 2.80, we're talking about workspaces, we all know about that. We're talking about collections, how to organize your scene. We all know that. And we kind of know about EV a little bit. But what some people might not know is how did that start? Why to even bother with real-time rendering? And is there only for rendering? Let's take care of it a little bit. We start to bring in technology which were in video games, which were used by the industry as a whole to modernize how artists use their tools within Blender. Which means, of course, real-time rendering, but also means much, much more. Geez, grease pencil. We didn't even see that coming. There's those artists working in Spain really trying to get storyboarding agenda moved forward. These animations, so many things, so many things. I don't need to preach what Blender is about. We all know about it. But if you look back at it, it says, oh, wow. It's actually this way. Oh, wow. So many has passed. We actually got so many things crumbled inside this little piece of software, which is still under 200 megabytes. I mentioned briefly that, okay, we had real-time rendering techniques used for video games. That's not only for EV. What does that mean? That means you can have non-photorealistic rendering, helping someone to visualize the whole scene, helping to have an overview of some basic shadows. That's not realistic shadowing, but gives a good read of the scene when you're working on it. You all remember the old way to display normals in Blender. But if you have a whole modern pipeline for rendering, why not just simply have one single path that shows what's wrong with the model? All hair, whoever did grooming in the past must be really praised. And I'm surprised they don't give up. They haven't given up on Blender at the time. Because now we can do grooming in real time. We have seen Daniel talk yesterday and have this level of quality, not only for rendering, but for work. The idea was also always to bring this kind of technology to facilitate what you're doing every single day. Play Blast can be fancy. Grooming can be fancy. One central piece of 2.80 was Eevee. It was something that got us a lot of traction. A lot of people jumped on board. Right from the beginning, we get artists such as Danielle volunteering to send us files. He joked that when he started using 2.80, there were no mode fires. Everything had to be baked and applied. And the moment we had armature mode fires in, he said, okay, I have something I want to play with. And then he gave us the tree creature. And it's a file that anyone can download. But we also collected right in the first year, 2017, two years before the future release, we are going to SIGGRAPH and saying that people are already playing with these. You guys can maybe share a few files. And people are just okay. Probably all of them have to be applied because there's no mode fire. But people were already using it. If you look at the presentations, if you go back to YouTube and watch every single presentation here, there's probably, I haven't seen a single 2.7 screen in the main stage. Everyone's using 2.80. Now, think about that. 2.80 was officially released in August. The calls for people to send their presentation was also August. What happened? How can everyone be using 2.80 before it's out? Because that's the community. People, we are building Blender together and we built, we got that far together. This is one of my favorite pieces. This was the Blender 2.80 splash screen for two years. Two years. Before the release, we just had this as a main screen. This is my work desk. Any similarity with the Eevee name and the Pokemon is pure coincidental. One thing interesting about Eevee, actually let me bring it back here. At first, the main goal was to replace the Blender internal. We wanted to open Cintel files with 2.80 and it would be just automatic. Everyone would be so excited. Oh, my God. I said during those two years, people were just taking it and saying, I don't care about the Blender internal. I don't want to use cycles anymore. They were replacing cycles with the Eevee. They said, wow, okay, let's embrace that. We still don't support the Blender internal versioning. We just remove it. Don't remove it. Very controversial. Not really. I still know people that are using 2.7, but something changed and has been changed for two years. The process has been very, wow, it's quite a ride for everyone. Let's talk about a bit of development of Blender. Something that's very fuzzy throughout the years that changed a lot. But I want to talk about the 2.8 specific. Before the so-called cold quest, we actually had a whole year. It's living in Amsterdam. Clema, it's Clema here. I haven't seen him here. No, he didn't make it. Clema's a great developer. He got on board. He got Mike Irving and we have a core team already working in the dependency graph in library overrides. So for a whole year, we tried to settle the foundation for what was going to be the 2.80. And then, you know what? Why don't you bring everyone on board? Why don't you bring every single of those external contributors to Blender or higher developers that are Australia, United States, in the same place? And that's how we tried to do for the Blender cold quest. So this was for the first year. It was so exciting, the viewport. But the cold quest was going to be so much bigger. So we came from like, I say, like 5-ish developers, 6 developers to a team of 10. Let's tend to 12 developers at a single time. And at that time, I was then in charge to help facilitate the development. I'm no manager. I'm an architect. But if I can help people to talk to each other, the designer, the engineer, with the client, that gives me joy. And I think we put quite a team together here. One thing interesting that at first, we were expecting the industry to really come on board and give us like a lot of money. We understand that 2.80 is going to be fantastic. We did have support from the early days. AMD was sponsoring us. They sponsored the Blender conference for a few years. Tangent animation. They actually were one of the main sponsors of the new viewport of EV, my own salary. Thank you, Tangents. But the response to the kick to the crowdfunding for the cold quest was a bit underwhelming when it came to the industry. But all the users that we knew that we had then, we are always shy. The Blender as a foundation, we're always shy to actually ask for money. No, Tony is like, I don't care about money. But then people were just like, I want to give them money. I want to see it happening. I can see the point of getting everyone together in the same place. And I want the nice little rocket. So cute. And it was a huge, huge, huge success. Until then, we still have it in a way, the Blender development, since it started, since it went out of the company and become open source, was really moved, tailored. So we had a project at the Blender Institute. And with this project, we had a very clear use case and guide the lines to where do I want the Blender to be. There's a game on that. This is a very project care. It's the first project I got the credit in the poster, because I got to select the whole process, just helping a little bit of TD, not a lot. And we still use those projects to further Blender, but the industry took Blender over. They came over to us and said, well, I'm also using Blender. We all know tangent animation. We all know what they did with Next 10. So they also have a vision that we can share and work together. And their moves was seen by millions of people in their couch. It's incredible. That's a new TV. That's a new cinema. How many people go to cinema nowadays? So Blender is really walking hands in hands with those partners, with how we're making art nowadays. Next 10 was not the first feature film we had in Blender. That credit goes to Plumifros, production Argentina. Aussie was the first one from Tangent, made in Blender. It's a simple project, small, a very small budget, but they had an amazing distribution. If you went to Paris during the month when Aussie was released, you could get a Macadona in Paris. The main cover was a Blender character for a Blender movie. We're not kids anymore. Maybe we're not I don't know if you can watch the whole thing, but who are getting there was making waves. And I was bringing the agent also, because we have this backbone green that at some point we might want to make our own feature films inside the Blender headquarters, which doesn't fit a film production here. This is the place where development was happening for Blender, well, beside the internet, of course, where the animation movies were made for the Blender Animation Studio, where the foundation as part of the chairman was there, and it was a beautiful place. We could do so many things there, but as you can see, this was a podcast we recorded. We had a mattress on the back. We had a bike that was probably trying to get fixed. And we could do everything as a meeting, as a whiteboard. This is to 2016. We had a usability workshop as part of the kickoff, as part of the kickoff for the for what then be the 2.80. And we're just we didn't have space. You can see we're using every single surface we had to write things. You see here's layer. This is when we're trying to replace layer with what then became the collection system. Trying to get artists and so hard. It's fighting the fight. But it's also a very beautiful location. If you're ever staying here a bit longer, if you go to the Interpol Doc, it's near the zoo. It's a beautiful place. You can wake up if the monk is talking. It's beautiful throughout the whole year, but it was small and it had to move, it had to grow. We went to the north. This is in the, I think everyone knows that tomorrow the studio is open for visitors starting noon. We are off the daylight saving time change. But we had to move and then we moved to this amazing space with the most incredible cleaning staff. Everyone had to help. People had to paint the walls if they wanted the standing desks. People that had time just because we all believed in that. And you all see that we wanted to grow together with Blender. So the car development team. And we could have so many meetings. Have Campbell, Brad, Francisco here. We could receive visitors without disturbing the production. Those are my parents. You could watch TV in the lobby cheering for the World Cup. So it could fit a lot of things and some serious things such as training courses. Now we could finally have a solid training facility that can receive professions from the industry. How was the Blender development team in a way? For years we had this very scattered team throughout the world. People from Europe, America, people working as a contractor for the Blender Foundation, or institutes from home, or from the institute, or here working from Google, coming constantly every now and then. We had Andrea contributing patches, though people that have a day job then they work on the side. Students, companies trying to get crowned funds like the Compostor Work, Munich, and Yeroum. They had their own crown of funding happening on the side, and then Yeroum now is on board with us. So we have all this decentralized structure. But because of the code quest, I believe we try to not only centralize, but to make sure that everyone, doesn't matter where they are, doesn't matter if it's a user or as a developer, can follow the whole process together and can work together as a team. We put a lot of effort in communication. That goes for the blog we have, the code.blender.org. Jesus Christ. And we really had this idea that it doesn't matter if a developer is here, if a developer is at home, it doesn't matter if it's a user, a power user, a technical user, we all should share the main mental models, the main core design. We call this design, it's not a UI design, maybe it's a product, project design. But we really put in effort since the community really took over the project on their own hands to make it work, wanted to give it back in a way that just making sure people could follow closely what we're doing. Probably started such an amazing work with the videos, we had live streams, we had almost daily updates on what was happening with Blender. This is one of the final live streams we had and we now have the Blender today, it's fantastic, it's amazing, millions, thousands of views every single day, every single Monday. But I think the seed that was planted back then was like, okay people are craving communication, they're craving this feeling of being part of the community and we're trying our best. This is also called the jail because this is a very cubical kind of industrial office, we have a few of them, can visit them tomorrow. How do you go about planning, how do we get 10 people together in the same room and make sure we're all working together? Honestly we just used Inkscape. We had a white board with every single task we had to perform. What you see here in red are things that we cannot do without, more the fantasy graph, infrastructure, I can barely read, all the guys can read, it's beautiful. So many different tasks, but we had a few of the blue ones, which are the ones that, well we need them, however if you have to move them forward it's not a problem because we knew that people would be using since the beginning, we knew that we need to be flexible in allocating our developers. Once something very interesting, you see here this huge black bar, so this is the cold quest planning overall, three months planning. In the middle of it we have this black bar. What is that? What is that? That's spring, that's when the spring team had to switch to Blender 2.80 and we blocked the entire week to make sure we could provide whatever support they needed, because then it's once again the Blender Foundation, the Blender Development Coordination, trying to take use movies as real use case and try to use this to base the direction we go. This is Andy Gorashi, great talking this morning and I would just go, I love art, we are in the digital art world, I'll just go there and just stalk him, and I said Andy just get used to it because I'm going to be doing this every single day, it's like a camera at some point you get used to it and I just start working with it and he got used to it and I love it and that also this is also a way to see how people are using Blender. Every time you get one of those sample files I mentioned I would go over the collections, they're not using collections yet, they're actually using collections in a nested way and it helps to just be with the artist, he's one of also the core principles of Blender and the Blender Development, how tie we are with the art community, with the users we have. It was also summer, which is kind of can get on the way, it's so beautiful, you can go picnicking and eating outside but honestly we still were crumbled together trying to squeeze the most we could out of the days we had, it felt way too short, three months felt way too short. It does help to have summer on the background, I got to see some nice things and again it's the new studio, the new institute, the new headquarter, there was room for everything but still you'd still find new corners to try to have meetings. So this is, was the old kitchen, now became one of the offices we have but whenever we had more than two, three people together there was something you could just discuss in person, so much, so much productive to do this way. As I said three months is short in a way because it just got ambitious. We're awful in project management, we're going to get better but to say since we have more people let's make more stuff, let's make more things in Blender. So this is a compiled list by July 2017 of not finished, we cannot get ready in time, just navigate to manipulator annotation system and try to figure out how long any of those things would take. I'll be honest here, starting July, so the code quest started in April, right, we had 10 developers, we had money, everything was so excited but starting July we'd be a team of four to five people only, coordination, there was no more money for that, there's no more funding, there's no more everything, so really okay we got a taste of what would be to work together in a structure environment with a lot of people collaborating but the the true reality is this was still a bit far from what you could have what you wanted to have, it did help though to have been three months together for everyone, you build this kind of common comradery, we know whenever you have a meeting with someone online over Skype, over chat you remember this person, remember when you're cheers chilling in the couch, it helps to build consensus later on but we still had this crave, we wanted more, we wanted more I'm so glad that then the Blender Foundation, I think Tom, we had Francesco, the whole team, like embraced, I think Pablo was always always pushing for this as well, embraced his idea that people are willing to contribute to Blender and they saw that they get features back, that they get they can see the process, we're still transparent, they trust our judgment in a lot of ways so the Dev Fund was put together this was, took this picture in the past, it doesn't even fit in the slide anymore just keep getting bigger, this was my we had not only overwhelming support from the community but then at some point got epic mega grant, oh my god and we have AMD, we have NVIDIA who else is gonna be on board, who else gonna be on board it's me saying but that means we can go back I think we can revisit what was that experience and maybe we can make it a more continuous continuous part of the flow of development of Blender we now have a more structured administration department or team at least, Tom is really continuous thinking the big picture still guide the direction of Blender but it's also the only person that can be talking to the big guys to get as money, to get as fund to bring Rubysoft on board, to bring time to get on board so it's nice that we're also trying to structure and grow as a more, it's not a vertical structure but a more professionalized structure that can have people that can train each other we can make sure onboarding is done properly so new contributors can feel part of these and really being powered to contribute to Blender to give it back to the community still a challenge we're still not there yet we see we grow too fast and yet we still have those developers scattered around the globe half of the teams in Europe these are a little bit the zest Central Europeans summertime work hours for all the developers for last month green means they're definitely online, yellow they might not they might be sleeping or not so like the first the basics we didn't even know like when do everyone work when can I try to get a meeting with someone because that's so again so big we're trying bi-weekly nowadays so every 15 days we go in one to two so I'm always trying to host and have two developers different developers every time have all the 18 of them like going over the week always have a topic what I would like to hear from them just to guide their direction like 10 minutes, 10 minutes and then 10 minutes to buffer just to chat a little bit this was one of the previous bi-weekly I always wake up at seven o'clock in the morning to attend it the way how so it's noon at Europe so I get some quick breakfast and we are trying to get it to work for us growing and of an open source development drives a lot of us to keep improving to keep working and keep growing professionally but for us a lot of unknown but I believe with what we learn with the code quest and how well received it was our effort and the result we got I do think we have a bright feature ahead thank you very much