

Offer to game programmers from a Blender 3D developer - pWneD
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=182497

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mrcharles
Game industry veteran here...

It's an interesting idea, but there's a some problems. First, the crossover
between those who need art in their spare time, and those who know how to
contribute to projects like Blender.

In reality, the people (like me), who love making games and are constantly on
the lookout for artists to help out with side projects, spend all of our time
doing gameplay code. Heavy 3d math, number crunching, data management -- that
kind of stuff tends to fall under the category of things we don't like doing
-- thus the expertise and passion for making games themselves.

On the flip side, the programmers with the ability to contribute to a project
like blender, are the kind of programmers who are specialists in a particular
field, and thus, from my experience, don't really branch out from that in to
the kind of things that would need art on the side.

Granted, these are generalities, but I've been in the industry for eleven
years and I've only met one person who crossed those boundaries (one Stan
Melax, a dude smart enough to correct John Carmack and passionate enough to
walk away from a job when it doesn't challenge or interest him).

Second, those of us who are passionate about making games and do need art, are
often more interested in collaborations which further our side projects. If I
were to contribute to blender, this doesn't really get my own projects
further. At least, not in a parallel fashion, more it's like I'm doing the
coding AND the art. Only I'm trading unrelated coding for art. Really, game
programmers who do this stuff on their own time are often selfish and/or
extremely focused on our own projects.

Third, even if I did contribute to blender as a trade, the reality is that it
doesn't further my skills in the direction I actually need for the stuff I do.
So ultimately, the whole thing is kind of more downside than upside.

Anyway, not to say it's not an interesting idea, and that it won't rope in a
few people, but it's going to be hard to find those people, ultimately.

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ComputerGuru
Interesting idea, but the barrier of entry to contribute code to a complex
project like Blender is waaaaaaaaay higher than the artists there seem to
imagine.

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zaphar
I never really thought the barrier to entry for blender was that high. I
tinkered in the blender codebase for a while and the code isn't that hard to
understand. They've since made huge strides in code organization so it's even
easier. Blender was my first real introduction to hacking on C code and I
found the dev community very helpful and accommodating.

~~~
chipsy
From a user perspective, Blender seems to have cleaner code behind it than
most of the commercial 3D apps; it starts faster, it crashes less, and I
haven't encountered bugs in functionality.

As for the interface - I find it dire for detailed editing tasks(I opt to use
Wings for modelling) but not too bad for managing the overall scene, applying
materials, lighting, compositing, etc. I speak as someone who's invested a
bare minimum of time into properly learning to use it.

~~~
zaphar
Blenders interface is built with power users in mind. They've made some
progress in reducing how steep the learning curve but they still have a ways
to go.

Your right about how clean/responsive and fast it is. They have justifiable
pride in how many features they include in such a small binary. When I was
hacking on it Blender weighed in at under 10 megabytes with features other
apps needed 100s of megabytes to provide. I think they still come in under 20
but I haven't checked in a while.

~~~
dirtbox
Blenders interface is built by programmers. There wasn't a visually creative
bone in the UI designers body.

~~~
mgcross
I would have agreed a few years ago, but the interface has come a long way,
especially with the 2.5 alpha:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Blender_2...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Blender_2.5_Screenshot.jpg)

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conflux0
I think this is one of those moments where it would be considered wrong to
disagree, but everyone eventually will just disregard it due to
impracticality.

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melling
It might work in a place like New York City. One of the Android groups here is
doing some OpenGL stuff. We're trying Blender, but most of us are a little
challenged.

[http://www.nycjava.net/JSPWiki/Wiki.jsp?page=JavaMobileStudy...](http://www.nycjava.net/JSPWiki/Wiki.jsp?page=JavaMobileStudyGroup)

~~~
NathanKP
As a Blender user myself I can say that it is very challenging to get started,
but once you learn all the keyboard shortcuts things become very fast and easy
to use. I feel that Blender gives me more control, even though learning it was
rather hard.

~~~
vog
The same is true for many other tools like Mutt, Slrn, Emacs and Vim. It takes
some time to get a feeling for them, but it's always worth the initial
learning effort!

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oliveoil
I was always thinking that the best recruitment grounds for open source game
content are design/architecture/animation/mechanical engineering college and
uni courses. The students can do their assignments plus have some fun playing
with their own models in an open source game.

Why is that not happening??

~~~
mgcross
I think it has been - Blender foundation is a participates in Google's Summer
of Code: <http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/GSoC/2010/Info>

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thisisnotmyname
My first thought is that it isn't a fair trade - art is a one shot thing, code
has to be maintained.

