Splash Screen .blend Guidelines?

This seems like the last topic here requesting splash screen art; it’s been suggested over on the BA forum (details there) that devtalk is the current place to ask about it.

I’m looking for the info given to recent splash screen artists on the splash blend file – criteria, requirements, intended distribution, that kind of thing. If that’s not here, can anybody say where it can be found?

Hi,
as far as I know the splash screen is chosen by the team at Blender nowadays. We reach out to artists and ask if their work can be used and the blend file published at Demo Files — blender.org

@pablovazquez is that correct? :slight_smile:

(I am closing this topic though, as this is a forum for Blender development, please see our forum rules.)

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That’s correct. We used to do contests for some splashes but that added a lot of overhead, and sometimes there’s really good artwork from artists that don’t (have the time to) participate on contests but it’s still really great art that we’d like to feature. Sometimes we’d like to feature an open movie from Blender Studio due to its impact in the development.

So for the time being splash artwork is selected by the team. The process is pretty simple, during the early stages of a release we go to popular places like ArtStation, BlenderArtists featured gallery, #b3d on Twitter/Mastodon or other social media, and look for artwork (or artists). We make a list, mockups of how it could look, share it with the team to ask feedback, then contact the artist to see if:

  1. They are okay with it, of course.
  2. The artwork can be used commercially (so e.g. books can use it as cover)
  3. They are willing to share the source .blend file, and the assets used can be shared (some websites like Poliigon only lend you the assets, you don’t own them so you can’t share them, same with Quixel Megascans I believe). It’s recommended to use assets from public-domain/CC-0 websites like PolyHaven.

This could change in the future, the community is so big right now compared to pre-2.8 that a contest could be fun, it just takes time and someone to organize it, curate it, and so on whose time better be spent elsewhere.

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