Blender History

 

In 1988, Ton Roosendaal co-founded the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo. NeoGeo quickly became the largest 3D animation house in the Netherlands. NeoGeo did award winning productions (European Corporate Video Awards 1993 & 1995) for electronics company Philips. Within NeoGeo, Ton was responsible for both art direction and internal software development. After careful deliberation it was decided that the current in-house 3D toolset for NeoGeo needed to be rewritten from scratch. In 1995 this rewrite began and was destined to become the 3D software tool we all now know as Blender.

As a spin-off of NeoGeo, Ton founded a new company called Not a Number (NaN) in 1998, to further market and develop Blender. At the core of NaN was its desire to create and distribute a compact, cross platform 3D tool for free. NaN hoped to bring professional level 3D modeling and animation tools within the reach of the general computing public. NaN's business model involved providing commercial products and services around Blender. Blender's first 1999 Siggraph tradeshow presentation was a huge success and gathered lots of interest from attendees as well as the press. Blender was a hit and it's huge potential confirmed.

On the wings of a successful Siggraph in early 2000, NaN secured financing （有抵押融资） of 4.5 million EUR. This large in flow of cash resulted in the rapid expansion of NaN to 50 employees. After the expansion NaN boasted employees working in the Netherlands, Japan and the United States. In the summer of 2000, Blender v2.0 was released. This version of Blender added an integrated game engine to the 3D suite. By the end of 2000, the amount of registered Blender users surpassed 250,000.

Sadly, NaN's ambitions and opportunities didn't match the company's capabilities and the market realities of the time. This over extension resulted in restarting NaN with new investors and a smaller company in April 2001. Six months later NaN's first commercial software product, Blender Publisher was launched. This product was targeted at the emerging market of interactive web based 3D media. Due to disappointing sales and the ongoing difficult economic climate, the new investors decided shut down all NaN operations. The shutdown also included discontinuing the development of Blender.

Although there were clearly shortcomings in the current version of Blender, with a complex internal software architecture, unfinished features and a non-standard way of providing the GUI, enthusiastic （极感兴趣的） support from the user community and customers who had purchased （购买） Blender Publisher in the past couldn't justify leaving Blender to disappear into oblivion （遗忘）. Since restarting a company with a sufficiently large team of developers wasn't feasible （可行的） , in March 2002 Ton Roosendaal started the non-profit Blender Foundation.

The Blender Foundation's first goal was to find a way to continue developing and promoting Blender as a community based open source project. In July 2002, Ton managed to get the NaN investors to agree on a unique Blender Foundation plan to attempt to open source Blender. The "Free Blender" campaign （战役） sought to raise 100,000 EUR so that the Foundation could buy the rights to the Blender source code and intellectual property and subsequently （后来） open source Blender. With an enthusiastic group of volunteers, among them several ex-NaN employees, a fund raising campaign was launched to "Free Blender." To everyone's shock and surprise the campaign reached the 100,000 EUR goal in only seven short weeks. On Sunday Oct 13, 2002, Blender was released to the world under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Blender development continues to this day driven by a team of far flung dedicated volunteers from around the world led by Blender's original creator, Ton Roosendaal.