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What is Amazon's interest in this ? I hope this is good news for the Blender Development Fund, but I'm scared of the possible consequences. I suppose we may en

by pstch 6y ago

What is Amazon's interest in this ? I hope this is good news for the Blender Development Fund, but I'm scared of the possible consequences. I suppose we may end up seeing Blender Cloud offering remote renders using AWS's infrastructure, which is good news unless it means tying the rendering engines to Amazon tech. For context, here is a brief overview of the 2019 financial report of the Blender foundation : - 33% of income (316 k€) from individual sponsors - 28% of income (267 k€) from EPIC Games - 27% of income (257 k€) from other corporate sponsors - highest salary: 58.4 k€ - lowest salary: 32.5 k€ (55% of highest) - 43% of expenses (416 k€) were salaries I really like Blender, and seeing it thrive in the last years has brought me immense pleasure. I hope that I have the chance to work with Blender again, and benefit from the recent improvements. Congratulations to the Blender Development Fund for this new sponsor, which I hope will bring value to the project.

an_opabinia 6y ago
It is probably as simple as talent development, it’s a drop in the bucket for an enthusiastic creator for Amazon Prime or to recruit a tech artist. People already use AWS for rendering.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nnx 6y ago
AWS has a 3D game engine part of their plans for cloud gaming https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/ https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/ So it is totally in their interest to invest in populae tooling that could improve 3D asset creation pipelines.
- akhosravian 6y ago
  Lumberyard is widely hated by folks working at Amazon and the only external folks I’m aware of using it are folks who moved from the engine it is based on. My understanding is they are moving away from it internally, but I have no privileged info there.
- hertzrat 6y ago
  People online talk about lumberyard being frustrating to use and in-progress on several fronts. The docs are better than unreals at first glance but the community isn’t massive so I’m not sure how easy it would be to debug any issues that came up. It’s forked from cryengine iirc, so it probably is amazing with outdoor vegetation-heavy scenes. I hope to try it out one day, but unreal has been very nice to use so far
mekster 6y ago
> highest salary: 58.4 k€ Is that the best you get for working on a complicated app that should have the ability to be used professionally? Do developers take the fame as part of their pay or else they can easily go elsewhere and get a double pay?
- willio58 6y ago
  I was going to say the same, this seems too low.
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    If you'd like them to be paid more, contribute. ;-)
  - ehnto 6y ago
    Outside of SV and investment bubbles software just doesn't pay much over your average white collar job. I actually don't mind. I want an economy with a fat middle class for blue and white collar workers, part of that is accepting fewer sky high salaries. Devs in VC bubbles must realise they are an anomoly and there are perverse incentives driving salaries up. Everyone else has to fit into a more grounded economic model.
    - akhosravian 6y ago
      I feel like this is a good application of the two red button meme. Do you want a fat middle class or do you want to get paid in line with the value your work produces? These aren’t inherently mutually incompatible, but the nature of software is distilling hard problems into products with nearly 0 per unit marginal cost. As a result one pretty ok programmer can generate millions of dollars of value.
      - ehnto 6y ago
        I definitely want the fat middle class, but it's a pretty complex reason that probably doesn't shake out in a free market. For one, we can make software more accessible to broader society. You are right that many types of software produce orders of magnitude more money than was put in. But if you were to look at the broader workforce and industry, you'll find that much software is just a small part of a much bigger machine that has almost nothing to do with software. That's where I would rather see more software developers. As it stands, VC pours billions into startups that make 0 money until they can flip the investment dollars on the public market. They stand somewhat isolated from the rest of the economy. That's why wages can get so high. Not because the software itself sold billions of dollars worth of service or value. There's probably lots of software that doesn't get written but would be hugely beneficial to the numerous facets of society, because small businesses can't afford a software engineer when competing with SV wages. That's me looking at things from afar, I am not in SV, and my experience is on the ground floor of software companies that are producing work for industries that aren't software. It's a totally different market, and I would rather see more software in this space than making another overvalued software doodad valued entirely for it's potential as an advertising platform.
yudlejoza 6y ago
> What is Amazon's interest in this ? The page says Amazon is funding 'character animation tools development.' Best guess: Amazon is about to disrupt clothing/fashion industry [0]. [0] https://youtu.be/JRLl8_StWGw https://youtu.be/JRLl8_StWGw
strogonoff 6y ago
> What is Amazon's interest in this? Look up AWS Thinkbox. Creatives have been rendering on AWS GPUs for a while now with automation tools like Brenda (in case of Blender), and Amazon is clearly looking to capture that market with a more comprehensive and user-friendly solution locked into their infrastructure. Would help sell more computing resources and all that. They have folks like SideFX and Autodesk on board, and a year ago I thought I’d seen Adobe but it’s not listed—either my memory is playing tricks on me, or Adobe left to compete with a platform of their own.
- harperlee 6y ago
  The less money you spend on a paid blender alternative yhe more you have to spend on Amazon; this is a very well known strategy of commoditizing your complement: https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement
  - strogonoff 6y ago
    What do you mean by “paid blender alternative”? How does spending less money on it increase my AWS bill?
    - steve_adams_86 6y ago
      If you free up software subscription money, you can afford more AWS services
      - strogonoff 6y ago
        Ah, thanks (I could not parse the sentence somehow). For an indie producer this is true in some ways. From the point of view of AWS, if you have spent multiple thousands of dollars on a Houdini FX license you may in fact have more you could give them than a one-person indie shop on Blender, but knowing AWS’s pricing they will surely not mind getting both. I wonder if Blender guys kindly told Amazon that they won’t spend time implementing or reviewing features required for various Thinkbox integrations unless Amazon forks over some support money.
Darkphibre 6y ago
As for open render clouds, I've been contributing to https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/ https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/ for quite some time. It's a client that downloads frames to render and uses your machine to do it, generating tokens for future renders. I'm currently in the top-20 in frame render contributions (rolling 30-day average)... should I ever have time to get into 3D rendering, my projects will be prioritized for sure. :P
didibus 6y ago
I'm surprised only 43% of expenses are salaries? What else does the foundation spend money on if not paying people to develop Blender?
- tt433 6y ago
  Probably hosting
jjcon 6y ago
That highest salary is pretty sad, are you sure that’s correct? Most bachelors students make that right out of school
- Twixes 6y ago
  In SV/NYC, sure. Costs and salaries are different in Europe though.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

by pstch 6y ago

an_opabinia 6y ago

It is probably as simple as talent development, it’s a drop in the bucket for an enthusiastic creator for Amazon Prime or to recruit a tech artist. People already use AWS for rendering.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nnx 6y ago

AWS has a 3D game engine part of their plans for cloud gaming https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/ https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/ So it is totally in their interest to invest in populae tooling that could improve 3D asset creation pipelines.

akhosravian 6y ago
Lumberyard is widely hated by folks working at Amazon and the only external folks I’m aware of using it are folks who moved from the engine it is based on. My understanding is they are moving away from it internally, but I have no privileged info there.
hertzrat 6y ago
People online talk about lumberyard being frustrating to use and in-progress on several fronts. The docs are better than unreals at first glance but the community isn’t massive so I’m not sure how easy it would be to debug any issues that came up. It’s forked from cryengine iirc, so it probably is amazing with outdoor vegetation-heavy scenes. I hope to try it out one day, but unreal has been very nice to use so far

mekster 6y ago

> highest salary: 58.4 k€ Is that the best you get for working on a complicated app that should have the ability to be used professionally? Do developers take the fame as part of their pay or else they can easily go elsewhere and get a double pay?

willio58 6y ago
I was going to say the same, this seems too low.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  If you'd like them to be paid more, contribute. ;-)
- ehnto 6y ago
  Outside of SV and investment bubbles software just doesn't pay much over your average white collar job. I actually don't mind. I want an economy with a fat middle class for blue and white collar workers, part of that is accepting fewer sky high salaries. Devs in VC bubbles must realise they are an anomoly and there are perverse incentives driving salaries up. Everyone else has to fit into a more grounded economic model.
  - akhosravian 6y ago
    I feel like this is a good application of the two red button meme. Do you want a fat middle class or do you want to get paid in line with the value your work produces? These aren’t inherently mutually incompatible, but the nature of software is distilling hard problems into products with nearly 0 per unit marginal cost. As a result one pretty ok programmer can generate millions of dollars of value.
    - ehnto 6y ago
      I definitely want the fat middle class, but it's a pretty complex reason that probably doesn't shake out in a free market. For one, we can make software more accessible to broader society. You are right that many types of software produce orders of magnitude more money than was put in. But if you were to look at the broader workforce and industry, you'll find that much software is just a small part of a much bigger machine that has almost nothing to do with software. That's where I would rather see more software developers. As it stands, VC pours billions into startups that make 0 money until they can flip the investment dollars on the public market. They stand somewhat isolated from the rest of the economy. That's why wages can get so high. Not because the software itself sold billions of dollars worth of service or value. There's probably lots of software that doesn't get written but would be hugely beneficial to the numerous facets of society, because small businesses can't afford a software engineer when competing with SV wages. That's me looking at things from afar, I am not in SV, and my experience is on the ground floor of software companies that are producing work for industries that aren't software. It's a totally different market, and I would rather see more software in this space than making another overvalued software doodad valued entirely for it's potential as an advertising platform.

yudlejoza 6y ago

> What is Amazon's interest in this ? The page says Amazon is funding 'character animation tools development.' Best guess: Amazon is about to disrupt clothing/fashion industry [0]. [0] https://youtu.be/JRLl8_StWGw https://youtu.be/JRLl8_StWGw

strogonoff 6y ago

> What is Amazon's interest in this? Look up AWS Thinkbox. Creatives have been rendering on AWS GPUs for a while now with automation tools like Brenda (in case of Blender), and Amazon is clearly looking to capture that market with a more comprehensive and user-friendly solution locked into their infrastructure. Would help sell more computing resources and all that. They have folks like SideFX and Autodesk on board, and a year ago I thought I’d seen Adobe but it’s not listed—either my memory is playing tricks on me, or Adobe left to compete with a platform of their own.

harperlee 6y ago
The less money you spend on a paid blender alternative yhe more you have to spend on Amazon; this is a very well known strategy of commoditizing your complement: https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement
- strogonoff 6y ago
  What do you mean by “paid blender alternative”? How does spending less money on it increase my AWS bill?
  - steve_adams_86 6y ago
    If you free up software subscription money, you can afford more AWS services
    - strogonoff 6y ago
      Ah, thanks (I could not parse the sentence somehow). For an indie producer this is true in some ways. From the point of view of AWS, if you have spent multiple thousands of dollars on a Houdini FX license you may in fact have more you could give them than a one-person indie shop on Blender, but knowing AWS’s pricing they will surely not mind getting both. I wonder if Blender guys kindly told Amazon that they won’t spend time implementing or reviewing features required for various Thinkbox integrations unless Amazon forks over some support money.

Darkphibre 6y ago

As for open render clouds, I've been contributing to https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/ https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/ for quite some time. It's a client that downloads frames to render and uses your machine to do it, generating tokens for future renders. I'm currently in the top-20 in frame render contributions (rolling 30-day average)... should I ever have time to get into 3D rendering, my projects will be prioritized for sure. :P

didibus 6y ago

I'm surprised only 43% of expenses are salaries? What else does the foundation spend money on if not paying people to develop Blender?

tt433 6y ago
Probably hosting

jjcon 6y ago

That highest salary is pretty sad, are you sure that’s correct? Most bachelors students make that right out of school

Twixes 6y ago
In SV/NYC, sure. Costs and salaries are different in Europe though.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]