Blender Studio and Blender Cloud

In March 2014 Blender Cloud was launched, with the goal of supporting the Gooseberry Open Movie crowd-funding campaign and acting as a sharing platform where all present and future Blender Open Movie projects could be shared.

Compared to previous crowd-funding campaigns based on DVD sales, creating a subscription platform allowed for more financial stability, enabling Blender to permanently hire a team of full-time artists and developers to produce Blender-centric content.

Initially, the team called itself Blender Animation Studio, which eventually became Blender Studio.

Over the years, the correlation between Blender Studio and Blender Cloud proved itself challenging to communicate. This happened mostly because the popular short films featured a prominent “Blender Studio” branding, but then all content would be available on Blender Cloud. If supporters wanted to help Blender Studio to create more films, trainings and assets they had to join Blender Cloud. Confusing.

On top of that, Blender Cloud started offering services such as production and render management, texture and HDRI libraries, Blender preferences synchronization, partially turning Blender Cloud into a SaaS (software as a service). Such services were explorations around the topic “Connecting Blender to the Internet to facilitate digital production”, but they were not of strategic importance for Blender Studio. The strategy was always: create industry grade content, push Blender’s limits and share production assets and knowledge.

Moving forward, we decided it’s more accurate to rename the Blender Cloud platform to the Blender Studio platform.

We believe that creating a stronger association between the content that Blender Studio produces and where it’s shared, will make it clearer why you should start or continue supporting Blender Studio.

What will happen to my Blender Cloud subscription?

Your subscription won’t be affected. From now on, we will refer to it as your “Blender Studio” subscription.

What will happen to Blender Cloud services?

Blender Sync, Image Sharing, Attract, Flamenco will stay around for a while, until we are able to offer them in an alternative form. For example, we are looking into turning Flamenco into an easy to deploy, fully standalone and self-hostable solution. We will share the planning for the future of these services in an upcoming post.

Should I donate to the Blender Development Fund or subscribe to Blender Studio?

The Development Fund and Blender Studio have different purposes.

The Development Fund is focused on enabling full-time developers –at the Blender HQ in Amsterdam and remotely– to work on core development, maintaining stability, providing official releases, and strategic projects concerning Blender as a software.

Blender Studio focuses on production, supporting a group of world-class artists to push Blender’s limits and openly share all production assets and knowledge (training and docs) on how to deploy Blender in studio environments.

Development Fund and the Blender Studio platform allow for the pursuit of two complementary tasks that when combined allow Blender to grow and improve as a mature production software.

The road ahead

In one week, the Sprite Fright film will be released, and we look forward to sharing it, along with plenty of making-of material, assets, breakdowns and more. We are excited to do all of this under the Blender Studio name for the first time!

In the upcoming days we will update and tweak our online presence to reflect this change (social media, blender.org websites, email support address, etc). If you need any support or need further clarification, get in touch with francesco@blender.org.