[Bf-committers] Re: EU have a dream? Blender in 2012!

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi,

I'm interested in this, but we would need to have a *really* good 
proposal, that most existing users and developers care about.

What might be interesting is making Blender "an open platform for 3d 
content creation, in education, research and open movies".

While Blender is an open source project, it is hardly extensible, and 
generally hard to get into, both for users and developers. Parts of the 
code are showing their age, and for external developers it is very 
difficult to extend Blender. For someone doing research or a student 
working on a project it is very hard to implement their feature in 
Blender (if they aren't already put off by the interface). I think this 
is a chance to improve the core of Blender and make it a nice, 
documented platform, to make future development easier, and allow others 
to extend Blender for their needs.

The other part would be evaluating and improving Blender as an 
application and platform in education, research and open movie projects.

That's pretty vague though ..


Reading ideas on blendernation, blenderartists and here, what I'm not 
sure is a good idea is:

Let's move Blender into CAD, VR, Medical Imaging, Audio production, ..
- Where is the user and developer community for this? Is this really 
something that Blender developers will want work with, and even maintain 
after those 5 years? Or will it turn into a separate project?

Let's add features X,Y,Z to make Blender competitive with other packages.
- Why should the EU care? Would certainly be nice to get some of these 
features out of such a project, but does it make for a convincing 
proposal by itself?

Let's do cutting edge research on topics X,Y,Z in Blender.
- I'm sure there are people who have ideas to do within such a context, 
but how many of those actually advance Blender itself, rather than 
adapting Blender to their specific needs? I think we need to avoid this 
becoming a project were each member just does their own thing. I think 
it would be best if this included topics more close to the core of 
Blender rather than a bunch of unrelated things, but I haven't seen the 
ideas for that yet.

Brecht.