Thanks for reminding me. I discontinued my Gold sponsorship a few months ago due to some serious illness-- but it’s in remission now and I just re-upped my Gold. That said, I’m not sure one’s contributions at Development Fund should be a deciding factor.
Still, it might be a better idea to just create a GoFundMe page to fund the development of the modifier. I wonder how much it would cost?
And if this is not accepted in trunk?
People will give money for nothing.
That’s why they give to the devfund instead, they hope that will happen.
I disagree with DeepBlender, people give to the fund to improve blender, if blender devs do only what they want, people will stop giving.
And if you start allowing only paid user to have a voice, then it’s a pay to win, but no since the bf don’t have to follow what people who paid want.
Do you see how it’s ridiculous?
I wish I could afford a dev fund membership! I’m a cloud supporter, that’s all I can swing right now. I agree, the dev fund is mostly a donation, but I think it’s reasonable to give priority to supporters, at least count their votes a little higher than people that make demands without contributing. There’s a million people with big, big, dreams for Blender that have no plans to make them happen on their own.
If it’s not accepted in Trunk, the coder did a bad job on the feature. If the code is good, it will be accepted. Nothing is stopping new devs from contacting the code reviewers ahead of time about what is and is not an acceptable solution. Code review is not a mysterious black box with random results.
Or it’s an unfair GoFundMe. The guy can at least set up a buildbot and keep the branch updated for people that have paid. Like with eCycles. It’s probably legally classified as fraud to accept money and not deliver anyway- so accepting money on the condition that somebody else makes a decision would risk being fraudulent.
So for you, someone who pays, who don’t know how to work should have priority over professionals?
And don’t forget that you don’t have to pay to help blender, for example, people who make tutorials, addons, have a community, show to their clients (3D companies) how blender could help them, etc, etc.
And they don’t have a voice in the process?
A lot of people came to blender because of tutorials, addons, etc and they give to the fund.
And if it’s different from usual blender tools but useful, effective and help a lot of people, but still not accepted in trunk?
The only way to have something in blender is from blender devs, forks etc don’t work because not everyone is willing to use a fork that will not be up to date like blender.
I don’t know where you got that from. I’m saying that people who contribute something should be given priority over people who don’t. I agree that there are other ways to contribute. I think contributing code is the only really important factor, then a distant second is contributing financially, and close to that other forms of contribution, like bug testing for example.
I repeat: “Nothing is stopping new devs from contacting the code reviewers ahead of time about what is and is not an acceptable solution.”
A) if you’re not willing to use the solution that’s offered to you, I don’t see that you have any business asking for more. Beggars can’t be choosers.
B) the scenario I suggested was “The guy can at least set up a buildbot and keep the branch updated for people that have paid. Like with eCycles”
As a clarification: I never mentioned that the developers should only do what they want. In my opinion it would be a great addition to rightclickselect to sort by the upvotes of development fund supporters. Like this, it would be visible what the community overall wants and what the paying supporters want.
And looking at this topic from a business or management point of view, it would be less efficient to implement this modifier right now, because it is planned to tackle it in the future anyways. It could happen that the concept gets rethough significantly and if that happens, everything that is added now can directly increase the development time in the future.
My impression is that they have been trying to improve the communication between the developers and the community as a whole in the past few years. And from my point of view, it became a lot better. That’s why my opinion is that their preferred way to communicate should be respected if one exists.
The whole point of the GoFundMe would be to HIRE through Blender a developer to create and add the modifier. If I’m not mistaken, Blender does accept targeted funding for features. See:
This high rated membership level starts at 6k per year and is for organizations who want the option to monitor in more detail the projects that will get funded with their contributions. They will get personal attention from the Blender team for strategic discussions and feedback on the roadmap.
I don’t know why this would be any different from a group asking for same.
Wow, glad you aren’t speaking for Blender! That is the most divisive thing I’ve read yet on this post. What about guys like Pablo Vazquez? What about all the artists in the Blender Animation Studio? What about Ton? What about all the support personnel? The documentation writers, the website designers?
Geez, talk about tunnel vision.
Yeah, when you put it like that it seems pretty silly!
But to be fair, the people that make the decisions about the direction of development are people that have contributed code. Ton wrote Blender originally, he doesn’t anymore but he did to begin with, and I think he’s a special case. And I was speaking specifically of people that make the road-maps, and do the code review. I just didn’t state it explicitly, my bad.
But yeah, in retrospect that’s a pretty stupid opinion. Good thing I can change those!
I completely understand your intention here. I personally think (and hope) this is not going to happen. Having a continuous and solid funding is very important and this approach could become harmful in the sense that supporters wait to fund the features they are looking for.
In my opinion it would be more healthy (as mentioned in my previous post) if the topics on rightclickselect could be sorted by the upvotes from the paying supporters. If the developers picked some of the popular tasks from time to time which fit into their development plans and wrote a short article about it, that would give a very positive signal in my opinion.
Perhaps you are correct. I’d rather look at it as an agreed upon collaboration. Not forcing Blender to accept a feature, but rather a discussion to agree on whether a feature is needed/wanted and if so, the best way to provide the necessary resources to get there. Of course, part of the resources include money-- it pretty much always does. 
Maybe as simple as giving people’s votes more numerical weight by how many badges they have. Cloud counts as +1 to votes, dev fund +1 per level, etc. But I think I’m getting us off topic. Oh what am I saying? We’re already way off topic.
Could you clarify what you mean by collaboration?
EDIT: I’d be willing to work with @Wazou and anyone else on writing the spec. It would include screenshots of the interface along with examples.
That’s very close to what happens in most companies in my experience. Except that you oversimplified 6-8 in an unacceptable way 
.
As mentioned, I am very skeptical about the “Raise the money” point. I am a huge fan of the Blender development fund and I think it would be great if there was a way that the supporters could make themselves heard in some way. This would provide a stable financial basis.
Feature based funding is highly critical and comes with an administrative overhead. I sympathise with you and the many great artists who have feature requests a lot, and I wish there was a simple and sustainable solution to this problem. Personally, I am unfortunately not aware of one.
Merge modifier would be extremely useful. Just to add my voice to the thread!! Many times we have to apply modifiers just to merge a few vertices that should be merged after other modifiers are used. I wouldn’t mind if it was not super efficient - as any other modifier, it could even be disabled in the viewport while working, and only enable it at render time
If we had more possibilities from the api this topic wouldn’t exist at the first place
too tense here. Whoo.
Hey don’t shoot the passenger it’s not up to me to decide i don’t know the technical reasons why the rejected it, but i am sure they have a good one for it otherwise we would have seen the modifier a long time ago…you don’t want to make enemies from people who voice a different opinion including developers, that’s not healthy for the whole community.
