The Blender Foundation and Institute

The four principal films in our film festival come from the Blender Foundation, a leading player in the open source film movement.

The information below comes from their website at www.blender.org

The Organization

Blender Foundation is a Dutch public benefit corporation, established to support and facilitate the projects on blender.org.

The Blender Institute houses the offices of the Blender Foundation – as well as a production studio and render farm – in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Revenues from Blender’s e-shop and media publishing enable Ton Roosendaal and a small staff to work full-time on Blender, organize activities for SIGGRAPH or the Blender Conference, support development, documentation and training projects, maintain and host blender.org services, and pay for bookkeeping and administration expenses.

Blender is a true community effort. Maintenance, new projects and roadmaps are all defined via open channels. You can learn more about them and get involved.

Goals

The Blender Foundation is an independent non-profit public benefit corporation. Its purpose is to:

Establish services for active users and developers of Blender
Maintain and improve the current Blender product via a public accessible source code system under the GNU General Public License
Establish funding or revenue mechanisms that serve the foundation’s goals and cover the foundation’s expenses
Provide individual artists and small teams with a complete, free and open source 3D creation pipeline.

The Software

Blender is a free and open source 3D animation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. Advanced users employ Blender’s API for Python scripting to customize the application and write specialized tools; often these are included in Blender’s future releases. Blender is well suited to individuals and small studios who benefit from its unified pipeline and responsive development process. Examples from many Blender-based projects are available in the showcase.

Blender is cross-platform and runs equally well on Linux, Windows and Macintosh computers. Its interface uses OpenGL to provide a consistent experience. To confirm specific compatibility, the list of supported platforms indicates those regularly tested by the development team.

As a community-driven project under the GNU General Public License (GPL), the public is empowered to make small and large changes to the code base, which leads to new features, responsive bug fixes, and better usability. Blender has no price tag, but you can invest, participate, and help to advance a powerful collaborative tool: Blender is your own 3D software.

Our Mission

We want to build a free and open source complete 3D creation pipeline for artists and small teams.

Read the mission statement about what Blender is by Foundation Chairman Ton Roosendaal.

The License

You are free to use Blender for any purpose, including commercially or for education. This freedom is being defined by Blender’s GNU General Public License (GPL).

Development

Blender is being actively developed by hundreds of volunteers from all around the world. These volunteers include artists, VFX experts, hobbyists, scientists, and many more. All of them are united by an interest to further a completely free and open source 3D creation pipeline. The Blender Foundation supports and facilitates these goals—and employs a small staff for that—but depends fully on the global online community.

More help is always welcome! From developing and improving Blender to writing documentation, etc, there are a number of different things you can do to get involved.

Development Sponsoring

In the past years Blender Foundation has accepted large donations from entrepreneurs and companies to fund development support and present on SIGGRAPH. We currently employ a variating team of 4 developers for general support and bug fixing.

More focused or specific development support goes via the Open Projects, organized by the Blender Institute, which allows large or more complex development targets to be realized, in conjunction with high quality content development.

Use the contact information below if you want to discuss these opportunities.

For monthly subscriptions you can sign up for the Development Fund.

IFS - First Online Film Festival