Blender Cloud 2017 Recap

It’s been a wonderful year for Blender Cloud! The growth of the platform, both in terms of features and content, has been remarkable and we want to thank all the subscribers who made it possible. Thank you!

Here is a recap of the main milestones of Blender Cloud 2017.

Agent 327

Operation Barbershop has been one of the most successful production of Blender Institute to date. The quality of the visuals and the narration got us some nice press and a few awards! Being able to share the entire journey on this production by sharing assets, shots and weeklies has been a unique experience!

This production also helped us pushing our shot and render management tools, but more on that later.

Courses

Two never-before-seen high-quality courses have been added to the training section:

• Blender Motion Graphics by Midge Sinnaeve. An in-depth training on how to understand and create motion graphics using embedded Blender tools
• Scripting For Artists by dr. Sybren A. Stüvel. A training aimed at Blender users and artists with no programming knowledge, which helps to understand how to leverage Blender on a deeper level, automating complex and tedious task, and more!

Workshops

This is a new category in the training section, where you can enter the artist workshop and learn by example. Some existing content has been moved there, and some more has been added, for example Low Poly Character Creation by Kjartan Tysdal.

Libraries: Textures and HDRIs

Our Texture and HDRI libraries are constantly growing, thanks to the work of the team, as well as donations. As a sample, check out the Myanmar collection by dr. Sybren!

Services: Attract and Flamenco

Attract and Flamenco, our production tracking and render management software, have seen incredible development during the production of Agent 327: Operation Barbershop. Not only we focused on making them stable and performant, we improved them with Blender Cloud users in mind, making sure that every subscriber (or team) could use them and configure them for their own production needs.

The Daily Dweebs

Finally, just a few weeks ago, we released a short and sweet animation: The Daily Dweebs! This hilarious one-shot emotional roller coaster was rendered in 8K resolution, stereoscopic!

What’s next?

The future of the cloud looks bright, with the upcoming Hero and Spring Open Projects, support or Organization accounts, improvements to the online pipeline –including new asset management tools– and more! Also, we are always happy to hear suggestions or ideas from you about how to improve Blender Cloud, so feel free to reach out at cloudsupport@blender.org.

Thanks to all Blender Cloud subscribers for your amazing support. Here is to 2018!

PS: We are hiring!

The Blender Cloud team is growing, and we are looking for a back-end developer! Check out the job posting if you are interested!