About

Video editing, sculpting tools, next-generation texturing, rendering speed-ups, node-based procedural workflow, the list of wanted features for Blender is endless. How to add these? Check out this 6 minutes video from Foundation chairman Ton Roosendaal explaining the process.

It all starts with core development: allowing a team of full-time software engineers to focus on developing and maintaining a stable and well documented codebase. This is the foundation for any new feature or improvement and it is essential for the survival and the growth of the project.

The community is the driving force behind Blender development. For over 15 years Blender has been an excellent example of public and community-driven project, enabling millions of users to create 3D content with a free tool.

In order to keep up with a growing user-base and meet new ambitious goals, Blender needs direct community support more than ever.

By joining the Development Fund, every member of the community can ensure the future of Blender, and get:

• Powerful software with new, groundbreaking features
• Stable software, with good development support and quick bug fixes
• Visibility and recognition online, via community badges

The goal of the Blender Development Fund is to communicate in a transparent way the level this process and enable the Blender project to grow.

Transparency

All Development Fund grants and supported projects have been published on blender.org since 2011. To improve transparency and involvement we will also:

• post a half-year report on past results and a roadmap proposal for projects to be supported in the coming half year. The reports will be shared on the code.blender.org blog (and mailing lists or the devtalk forum), open for everyone to discuss give feedback on.
• spend a small percentage (5-8%) of the budget on making development projects visible and accessible in general. That means improving communication (sending as well as receiving!), better technical documentation, and attention for onboarding of new developers.
• aim for the widest possible consensus on roadmaps. We expect that with the badges, development fund members have a good way to make sure they’re being heard.

Final decisions on assigning developer grants will be made by the Blender Foundation, verified and supported by blender.org development project administrators - the five top contributors to Blender.

A voting or polling mechanism is not in the planning - although it’s open for discussion and review, especially when roadmaps don’t get wide endorsements.

Individual Membership and Community Badges

We offer a Development Fund membership based on a small recurring donation, starting at 5 Euro per month. As reward members can get “badges” (tokens that show their support on prominent Blender websites) and a name mention on the blender.org website.

Companies and organizations are also welcome to sign up for individual membership and (optionally) have their company name and url mentioned.

Under the following conditions we offer a credit on our website:

• The credit has to be your own name, or your company name.
• We reserve the right to not publish names and/or URLS, unconditionally. We do this for websites that do not align with our public benefit goals (such as gambling or adult-only sites).
• We will add 'no follow' tags to urls.

Find more information about badges here!

Corporate Memberships

This high rated membership level starts at 6k per year and is for organizations who want the option to monitor in more detail the projects that will get funded with their contributions. They will get personal attention from the Blender team for strategic discussions and feedback on the roadmap.

In addition to this, corporate members can get a prominent name and logo mention on blender.org and in official publications by Blender Foundation .