MADE FOR EVERYONE
3D World charts the unconventional 26-year journey of Blender, from attic to industry outsider, all the way to legitimate 3D contender
A still from Agent 327: Operation Barbershop, an Open Movie co-directed by Hjalti Hjalmarsson and Colin Levy
Imagine that you’ve invested many thousands of euros and decades of your life developing software that creates worlds. Modelling, rigging, 3D animation, 2D animation, simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, and video editing.
In short, everything an artist needs. How much would you charge for this software?
Think about it. Maybe you’d like a villa in Palo Alto? Or an office by Norman Foster?
Or even a McLaren F1? Maybe you want to drive your McLaren F1 from your villa in Palo Alto to
your office by Norman Foster? No judgement: billions of people want some variation of this life.
Besides, you’ve made sacrifices. You help creative people make beautiful things. You deserve it.
But, practically, villas aren’t cheap. You’ll need money and lots of it. How about charging people
for a monthly or annual subscription? Or a one-off licence? Or payment for commercial usage?
How about nothing? How about the software is free to download and free to use for anyone
anywhere for whatever purpose, forever and ever?
How about you’re happy if somebody makes a whole feature film with your program and you
get zilch in return? In which case, the obvious question is, ‘why?’
BLENDER BEGINS
At well over six feet, Ton Roosendaal is an unlikely David to the CG industry’s Goliaths. Ton doesn’t have a Stanford MBA, nor is he an ArtCenter alumnus. In fact, Roosendaal originally wanted to be an architect. “That changed when I met a guy in a bar,” he says. “He told me about Industrial Design. I liked that it was both technical and creative.” But after two years, Roosendaal dropped out. “The college’s approach to education didn’t add anything to the quality of a student’s work,” he explains, “its top students were talented and hard-working from the start.”
The 29-year-old Roosendaal started a 3D animation studio in Eindhoven, a manufacturing town in the south of Holland. It’s the birthplace of Philips, the conglomerate responsible for TVs, lightbulbs, shavers, and the other kind of blender. Eindhoven is the opposite of Palo Alto. Roosendaal’s first studio was called NeoGeo (the games console of the same name appeared a year later). In a spin on the Silicon Valley garage of lore, NeoGeo spent its first year in Roosendaal’s attic before moving to the city centre, rapidly becoming the biggest studio of its kind in the Netherlands, with clients across advertising and industry.