
Ton Roosendaal and Blender receives ASIFA-Hollywood Ub Iwerks Award - based2
https://www.blender.org/news/ton-roosendaal-and-blender-to-receive-asifa-hollywood-ub-iwerks-award/
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knolan
Blender is awesome. It really is one of the best open source projects out
there. While it had a reputation for being inaccessible this hasn’t been the
case for a long time and 2.8 makes it even easier.

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mstade
I credit Blender for starting my career as a software engineer. I had
programmed a little before starting to use Blender, but never really got into
it past making some silly text-based adventure games and the likes. In the
latter half of the 90s I developed a huge interest in 3d graphics, not least
because of Pixar. My father took note and while I played around with some
pretty crappy modelling software I'd found on a shareware cd at some point, he
managed to find an SGI O2 for cheap in the late 90s. Amazing machine, loved
it, but the OS was IRIX (which I knew nothing about) and all the 3d software
that would run on IRIX was extremely expensive. Fortunately, this little
studio in the Netherlands gave away this piece of software for free – Blender
– and my older brother who was quite into Linux at the time helped me set it
up. I didn't understand any of it, but thanks to IRC and this amazing little
Blender community that popped up I learned how to work this thing and started
making whatever I could imagine.

My renders were mostly crap, but it was great fun and I kept spending my time
with it. Meanwhile, Blender grew more popular and gained a Python API with
which you could actually add little scripts, programs that would run inside
blender and make wheels on a car turn or what have you – it was absolutely
mind blowing to me. It meant that now, as I felt I was hitting the limitations
of Blender and grew increasingly frustrated by it, I wouldn't have to wait for
Ton & gang to implement features, I could start doing it myself! Of course I
had no idea what I was doing, so it was back to square one, but this time
learning to program rather than modelling or animation. It was amazing though,
that instant gratification of writing a script and seeing something other than
text render on screen!

I was terrible at math, and never really understood why we had to study it in
school. But all of a sudden I started realizing that trigonometry and algebra
actually had some usefulness beyond academic exercises. Blender in a way
forced me to start taking math seriously. It also improved my language skills
since I had to communicate in English with all these strangers over the
internet. Strangers who would take the time to teach a kid (though they
probably had no idea) how to model a person's face (it was the holy grail of
modelling for me at the time) or how to animate a car, or how to write a
script that would make those wheels on the car turn as it moved forward...

I stopped using Blender around the mid 00s, partly because I then had gotten
access to more powerful tools such as XSI, but also because I think the
programming interest took over and indeed I stopped making 3d graphics around
that time altogether as well. In -04 (or perhaps -05) I got my first paid job
as a programmer. I didn't go to college, I never got a degree in comp.sci. or
anything like that, it all really started with Blender. I'm now well into my
second decade as a professional programmer, which is pretty amazing come to
think of it.

Nowadays I tend to check in on Blender every once in a while and am always
blown away by just how for it's come. All the amazing artwork used with it,
and all the amazing people involved. A stunning success story, that I hope
continues for a long, long time.

Thanks a ton, Ton – can't think of a better person to receive this award!

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fwsgonzo
Very well deserved. Blender 2.8 really is a wondrous multi-platform free-as-
in-free thing.

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DonHopkins
Blender 2.8 is a huge leap forward in usability (and features too)! If you
haven't tried Blender recently, it's worth downloading the 2.8 beta and giving
it another try.

~~~
knolan
While I fully agree, moving from 2.7* to 2.8 default bindings is killing my
muscle memory! I’ll get there eventually.

For me eevee is probably going to make a huge difference, I throw together
various renders and animations and bits of code to help my students understand
what I’m teaching and the reduced render times really help.

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edwintorok
Nice achievement, maybe it will encourage more (short) movies like these to be
created:

[https://www.blender.org/about/projects/](https://www.blender.org/about/projects/)

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chansiky
Blender is great. It's well deserved. I'm actually amazed that it is an open
source project.

