Forum to fund our ideas
it seems very boring to just post your ideas here where you dont have any ideas about how your post is treated or read so i think there should be a dedicated forum specific to industry like character, vfx, motion design, 2d animation,architecture etc where we describe our problems in detail and we can tell similar people to fund the idea if they need it to be implemented fast and the forum should reflect how much funding the idea is getting so interested developer can choose to work on that idea and once they submit it to blender developer, they can test it and give the funding amount to that developer and also some portion to blender development fund.
This way blender project will not depend upon corporate support and some ideas that industry professional really want to implement fast in blender (especially in architecture) will fund those ideas. Also, common people will be encouraged to become a developer by working on those ideas. there can be some free training where people can learn all coding specially for blender as per the need of feature request.
3 Comments
thing is, getting your favorite feature funded and developped doesn't guarantee it successfully making it into Blender.
atleast we can try, I work for a small architectural firm and i really want to use blender here not just for visualization but also for making other stuff like 2d documentation, the problem is that blender mainly focused on animation and visualization despite having all the capabilities to use in manufacturing and construction work. look for Sketchup, it has very limited no of tools but are well polished and catered for specific workflow and hence it leads the interior design market. I have also seen that many blender features like boolean modifier, bevel type-arc & patch are implemented in 3ds max 2024 so quickly. I mean all other players are implementing features as per the workflow of industry but blender shows no development towards architectural needs despite having possibilities to do so.
I know blender team is busy so why not indulge the common people where one will fund for the requirement and other will fulfill it as per the need and it will benefit both the party and also upcoming generation. otherwise, we have to pay for repeated monthly subscription of autodesk even for older versions, it looks like paying for the past. but with what i have proposed will benefit all the people of the industry and also the same feature will be somehow utilized by people of other industry as well. i think you are saying that merging that work will require extra time and effort to make it compatible with regular blender, yes it maybe but this will pay off in long-term as developers will emerge from such an environment and will tackle this issue as done in other software development.
I don't think without such effort blender will be used in the industry's main workflow, it will just be a tool for hobbyist and YouTubers who shouts at every blender release without having any idea about how those tools will be used by specific peoples, also some of our blender learner comment on other forums as the blender is best and just criticizing those tools like Maya and 3ds max. the energy of those people can be channelized in a positive way and ultimately they will know that software is just a tool for accomplishing a task, maybe some software does it in an easy manner and other software will do other things fast but what creates the major difference is the underlying operating principle/philosophy of the software whether to make software to make other artists life easy or to churn out profit by selling monthly subscription and divide the industry in n number of software to satisfy the investor's greed. i am tracking the development of blender since 2.8 release and there is so many features released but hardly any feature that improve CAD, Nurbs or BIM. it improved like a glass of water in the pond while other BIM packages completely overhaul their workflow (take Revit for example). the efforts put by people like MakerTales, BimVoice, IFC architect are very subtle as compare to demand of the industry. without any massive revolution blender will be just the tool of hobbyist who even aren't aware of whole plethora of blender. this is because the burning fire of people was never ignited and it is their just in the form of fuel which never gets utilized.
The point I make is that developing a feature and having it implemented in Blender are different things and developping more features will always hit the implementation bottleneck.
Anyone is free to download Blender's source code and develop anything. It's already happening.
But eventually comes the time to have this bit of code sent to the BF. Someone in the core dev team needs to review it, make sure it works, follows Blender's design and guidelines, doesn't break anything else, is maintainable, (...). And if all of this checks the marks, only then it can be added in Blender for everyone to enjoy. But otherwise it won't.
But there again we hit the same wall: devs' manpower is limited, and not all patches are good apples.
The only alternatives to that is either publishing forks of Blender (i.e. UPBGE and Bforartists) or develop feature as addons to Blender and publish as thirdparty (like retopoflow or CAD sketcher).
There's only so much the devs can do. And the project page is already covered of patches and features already developed just waiting for review because the current team is unable to review them all, and some of them simply do not comply to the technical needs.