There’s so many amazing breakthroughs, I thought perhaps it might be a good idea for Blender to host an annual competition, where the creators of the 3 best 3d innovations can win a cut of 10% of the blender developer fund to make their findings opensource and assist the blender devs to incorporate the new technology into Blender (it appears a lot of these are already created in Blender).
This would benefit Blender hugely by giving it the first access to the latest and greatest breakthroughs, and also the students who’d get financially rewarded as well as a lot of recognition.
I read earlier today Octane have licenced the code from Embergen (real time physics simulation), and I thought it’s a shame Blender is always at the back of the queue on new innovation (unless it involves pablos sculpt tools (cloth brush)). Maybe this could be a way to get ahead of the queue, whilst also encouraging freelance developers, schools and universities to use Blender even more.
Maybe two could be chosen by the devs, and 1 by the community.
for sure, any innovations in 3d should be considered. I’d probably vote for anything that sped up simulations through AI or multithreading/gpu acceleration, because I think this is the most lacking area of Blenders 3d toolset at the moment. Mantaflow’s alright, but the dev has said there’s no plans for multithreading/gpu acceleration etc, so it’s going to remain slow until it’s replaced it seems.
I had propose something similar a few days ago. But there doesn’t seem to be much interest in that kind of financing for innovations\features in Blender, at least for now
My idea was to do a “feature quest” instead of taking money from the dev fund (which pay the devs) but I think it is similar as your proposal.
Will see how the dev fund goes… Almost 4000 members at the time of writing.
