Funding Blender Institute activities

Blender Institute is the spin-off of Blender Foundation, the main office and studio where Blender projects are being challenged and validated. Since 2007 we've invested in developer+artist projects to get Blender move up to production quality level. We could do this thanks to the massive support from our supporters who bought books, training dvds and who supported the open movies.

With dvd sales only going down, we've decided to build an equivalent service to offer all of our data and videos in one place - online in the Blender Cloud. The Cloud then is meant to grow into a real production platform, with tools to work together on animation film and other media projects using Blender.

Thanks to Cloud subscribers in the past two years we could make Cosmos Laundromat, Glass Half, Caminandes Llamigos, the Blenrig project, Texture assets and many tutorials.

Blender Institute currently employs Ton Roosendaal and Sergey Sharybin to work on Blender, Anja Vugts-Verstappen for Foundation/Institute administration, Francesco Siddi and Sybren Stüvel to work on Cloud features, and three to five artists to work on content and tutorials - including Andy Goralczyk, Hjalti Hjalmarsson, Pablo Vazquez.

Production services and software

Blender Cloud is meant to be the place where we will share production technology and services - in free/open source software - for everyone to provide them with a 3D creation platform in the widest sense. Expect shot management, file sharing and versioning, and render farm support being rolled out in the near future. We expect to contribute significantly to Blender 2.8 development. And of course a lot of exciting film projects, including new episodes of Cosmos Laundromat.

The software for Blender Cloud V3 has been re-written from scratch - now offering discussions and reviewing options for all subscribers. We'd love to get your feedback to help us defining the agenda for the roadmap here.

Everything you find in Blender Cloud is either GNU GPL compliant software, or creative content that's licensed as Creative Commons. We use three CC licenses here:

CC-BY:A permissive license that allows any re-use for as long you give a fair credit. It's the default license. If you don't see an explicit license mention on a web page, you can assume the works is CC-BY.

CC-0:This is similar to Public Domain. We want to license low level assets (textures, props) as CC0 as much as possible.

CC-BY-SA:The copyleft license. Any re-use is fine for as long you share it under the same (compatible) license. We use this for works we want to remain part of Free Culture.

Excluded from any of the above licenses are: Logos and trademarks (Blender logo, but also the film title designs), privacy and personality rights (people in pictures or videos are not CC themselves).

Thanks!

The Cloud team: Francesco Siddi, Pablo Vazquez, Ton Roosendaal.