Thanks to the first Steam Workshop donation payment, we can now invest quality developer time for getting Blender work better in game creation pipelines. I”m happy to announce that Blender developers Dalai Felinto and Bastien Montagne have accepted a 6 month contract to work half-time on supporting game artists! Their contract will become effective this week.

First thing Dalai and Bastien will do is investigate with artists out there (via Steam Workshop too) a nice priority list of topics to handle. This will be publicly reviewed in our many channels and become part of the weekly meetings in IRC too.

Valve expects that Steam Workshop is going to be earning us a sizeable share. We”ll learn more about this during the next months though. But if this continues, more projects for developers can be funded this way. Main focus will be on good tools for game artists though, including features that benefit everyone well too. This also opens up an opportunity to realize a bigger project related to our Game Engine. That”s something we”ll discuss with the current GE team first though.

Exciting times ahead! Many many thanks to Valve and to the Steam Workshop members who decided to support Blender Foundation this way!

-Ton-

Added note: there”s a new mailing list to discuss and organize this all: https://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-gamedev