AWS Joins the Blender Development Fund | Hacker News Reader

AWS Joins the Blender Development Fund

blender.org

137 pointsEMIRELADERO42 comments

What is Amazon's interest in this ?

I hope this is good news for the Blender Development Fund, but I'm scared of the possible consequences. I suppose we may end up seeing Blender Cloud offering remote renders using AWS's infrastructure, which is good news unless it means tying the rendering engines to Amazon tech.

For context, here is a brief overview of the 2019 financial report of the Blender foundation :

- 33% of income (316 k€) from individual sponsors

- 28% of income (267 k€) from EPIC Games

- 27% of income (257 k€) from other corporate sponsors

- highest salary: 58.4 k€

- lowest salary: 32.5 k€ (55% of highest)

- 43% of expenses (416 k€) were salaries

I really like Blender, and seeing it thrive in the last years has brought me immense pleasure. I hope that I have the chance to work with Blender again, and benefit from the recent improvements.

Congratulations to the Blender Development Fund for this new sponsor, which I hope will bring value to the project.

> What is Amazon's interest in this?

Look up AWS Thinkbox.

Creatives have been rendering on AWS GPUs for a while now with automation tools like Brenda (in case of Blender), and Amazon is clearly looking to capture that market with a more comprehensive and user-friendly solution locked into their infrastructure. Would help sell more computing resources and all that.

They have folks like SideFX and Autodesk on board, and a year ago I thought I’d seen Adobe but it’s not listed—either my memory is playing tricks on me, or Adobe left to compete with a platform of their own.

The less money you spend on a paid blender alternative yhe more you have to spend on Amazon; this is a very well known strategy of commoditizing your complement: https://www.gwern.net/Complement

What do you mean by “paid blender alternative”? How does spending less money on it increase my AWS bill?

If you free up software subscription money, you can afford more AWS services

Ah, thanks (I could not parse the sentence somehow).

For an indie producer this is true in some ways.

From the point of view of AWS, if you have spent multiple thousands of dollars on a Houdini FX license you may in fact have more you could give them than a one-person indie shop on Blender, but knowing AWS’s pricing they will surely not mind getting both.

I wonder if Blender guys kindly told Amazon that they won’t spend time implementing or reviewing features required for various Thinkbox integrations unless Amazon forks over some support money.

AWS has a 3D game engine part of their plans for cloud gaming https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/

So it is totally in their interest to invest in populae tooling that could improve 3D asset creation pipelines.

People online talk about lumberyard being frustrating to use and in-progress on several fronts. The docs are better than unreals at first glance but the community isn’t massive so I’m not sure how easy it would be to debug any issues that came up. It’s forked from cryengine iirc, so it probably is amazing with outdoor vegetation-heavy scenes. I hope to try it out one day, but unreal has been very nice to use so far

Lumberyard is widely hated by folks working at Amazon and the only external folks I’m aware of using it are folks who moved from the engine it is based on.

My understanding is they are moving away from it internally, but I have no privileged info there.

> What is Amazon's interest in this ?

The page says Amazon is funding 'character animation tools development.'

Best guess: Amazon is about to disrupt clothing/fashion industry [0].

[0] https://youtu.be/JRLl8_StWGw

As for open render clouds, I've been contributing to https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/ for quite some time. It's a client that downloads frames to render and uses your machine to do it, generating tokens for future renders. I'm currently in the top-20 in frame render contributions (rolling 30-day average)... should I ever have time to get into 3D rendering, my projects will be prioritized for sure. :P

It is probably as simple as talent development, it’s a drop in the bucket for an enthusiastic creator for Amazon Prime or to recruit a tech artist. People already use AWS for rendering.

> highest salary: 58.4 k€

Is that the best you get for working on a complicated app that should have the ability to be used professionally?

Do developers take the fame as part of their pay or else they can easily go elsewhere and get a double pay?

That puts you just below the top 10% of earners in the UK, which is not exactly cheap to live in so I would define that as very good salary. You have to remember that a) FAANGS have insane salaries not seen anywhere else but the price you pay as an employee is living in the Bay Area, which is hugely expensive and also, politely, not to everyone's taste. And b) the additional costs paid by an employer for things like pension, employer contributions to health care etc. are generally higher in Europe than in the USA so the total cost of an employee to the the employer and the concomitant benefits the employee gets (paid holiday, paid sick leave, protection from being fired for no reason, a decent pension) are much higher than in the USA. It's a trade off but I'd rather get paid 55,000 Euro and live in most of Europe than 100,000 Euro and live in most of the USA.

I was going to say the same, this seems too low.

Outside of SV and investment bubbles software just doesn't pay much over your average white collar job.

I actually don't mind. I want an economy with a fat middle class for blue and white collar workers, part of that is accepting fewer sky high salaries. Devs in VC bubbles must realise they are an anomoly and there are perverse incentives driving salaries up. Everyone else has to fit into a more grounded economic model.

I feel like this is a good application of the two red button meme. Do you want a fat middle class or do you want to get paid in line with the value your work produces?

These aren’t inherently mutually incompatible, but the nature of software is distilling hard problems into products with nearly 0 per unit marginal cost. As a result one pretty ok programmer can generate millions of dollars of value.

I definitely want the fat middle class, but it's a pretty complex reason that probably doesn't shake out in a free market. For one, we can make software more accessible to broader society.

You are right that many types of software produce orders of magnitude more money than was put in. But if you were to look at the broader workforce and industry, you'll find that much software is just a small part of a much bigger machine that has almost nothing to do with software. That's where I would rather see more software developers.

As it stands, VC pours billions into startups that make 0 money until they can flip the investment dollars on the public market. They stand somewhat isolated from the rest of the economy. That's why wages can get so high. Not because the software itself sold billions of dollars worth of service or value.

There's probably lots of software that doesn't get written but would be hugely beneficial to the numerous facets of society, because small businesses can't afford a software engineer when competing with SV wages.

That's me looking at things from afar, I am not in SV, and my experience is on the ground floor of software companies that are producing work for industries that aren't software. It's a totally different market, and I would rather see more software in this space than making another overvalued software doodad valued entirely for it's potential as an advertising platform.

Is there much of that middle class in Europe, though? My definition of "middle class" is "someone with substantial savings, almost enough to not work" and I suppose that there isn't much left from 50k after food and housing bills are paid.

"there isn't much left from 50k after food and housing bills are paid"

This is quite US centric view (partially due to higher prices, partially due to runaway expectations).

This was quoted in euro, maybe at least some employed people are outside USA?

To quote results of <minimum wage Ukraine> search:

> As of today, September 1, 2020, the minimum wage in Ukraine amounts to 5,000 hryvnias (181,4 dollars) per month and 29,2 hryvnias (1,06 dollars) per hour.

I understand tour point but keep in mind that developerstht can work a bit remotely will makemih more than minimal wage of their country and more importantly minimal wage is a decision, you can have a rich country with no (or very minimal) minimal salary. Could be interesting to find 1st decile salary or median by example.

You've got to compare salaries against COL in the region; a salary amount alone is meaningless. The second question is "where do these devs live"?

I feel like this is a bit of a misconception. Most of the time cost of living doesn't scale alongside compensation increase. And most devs in high paid regions, even if their region has a higher COL still end up with much more wealth in the end.

For example, San Francisco COL will be around 5000$ per month for rent, utilities, food, transportation, etc. Where as dev compensation will be around 150k a year. On which you'll pay about 36% in tax, leaving you with about 100k a year. That's 8333$ a month.

So as an average dev in San Francisco your monthly profit will be 3333$ a month. That's 40k a year in savings.

Now we were looking at a high compensation of 58.4k and a low of 32.5k based on OP about blender compensations. That's an average of 45k. So their COL and tax burden would need to be less than 5k just to make the same amount as the average San Francisco dev. Any higher then that (and it's very likely to be higher), and they are making less than the average San Francisco dev.

Now that's not all. The largest portion of the COL of the dev in San Francisco was rent, 3500$ went to rent. That means, any dev in San Francisco can easily choose to make an extra 1750$ a year simply by choosing to live with a roommate. Or they can easily make an extra 500$ by choosing to rent slightly further out. If they happen to live with a partner that has income, and especially if they also are a tech worker (which happens often since so many people in San Francisco are working in tech), well they both similarly now make an extra 1750$ a month. That's an extra 21k a year, so now that dev can have a profit of 61k a year if they want, which is more than the total compensation of the highest paid blender dev.

And if the San Francisco dev manages to get a home loan and purchase a home or condo, they can expect to make back close to 2500k per month which they were previously losing in rent.

So I'm not saying COL doesn't matter, but most of the time, regions with higher pay, even if higher COL, still leave you in a much better financial situation.

The only real thing you sacrifice is the size of your home or apartment. But for a lot of people, that's a fine sacrifice to make, especially temporarily, say in the first 15 years of your career for example.

Are you suggesting one should pay more because his living expense is higher than the other?

You should pay for how much is being contributed.

The only thing that should lower the pay is developer's own satisfaction. In other words, one would pay more for stuff others don't want to do or incapable of doing.

You should pay for how much is being contributed.

Well, this simply isn't how it works in capitalism. Garbage truck workers also contribute a lot to society (wait until they go on strike for a month). However, the job is paid badly, since it requires very little education, so almost anyone can do the job.

If you actually take the word "contribute" to a better degree, if a work can be done by anyone even though the society needs it, it's not much of a contribution.

(To the [deleted] sibling comment)

Salary is a salary with a fixed value. If it's justified is what he does and not where he lives.

He can live like a celebrity and waste it all or can live like a student to save, that is up to the dev.

If you'd like them to be paid more, contribute. ;-)

I'm surprised only 43% of expenses are salaries? What else does the foundation spend money on if not paying people to develop Blender?

Probably hosting

That highest salary is pretty sad, are you sure that’s correct? Most bachelors students make that right out of school

In SV/NYC, sure. Costs and salaries are different in Europe though.

Surely out of the good of their hearts. Isn't this nice? :)

Passive aggression much.

Sigh, why would you think that a corporation that has shareholders, and no that's not inherently evil, should be charitable in any way it's not their money to just give as they please.

This is all perfectly reasonably, blender is a fantastic tool, and a poster child the successful open source development. They have really stepped up their game in terms of presentation and accessibility over the last decade.

I’ve only used blender for a weekend or two but the controls are very strange compared to unity and unreal. Are other 3D modelling and animation programs similar? Seems really slick for power users but hard to dabble with

> Blender Foundation will start recruiting in the course of Q1 2021, pending the current travel and meeting restrictions being lifted or relaxed.

Why wait for travel restrictions to be lifted?

Liability.

I don't understand why travel or meeting is necessary for them to hire staff, was my thinking. What is the liability issue with hiring someone remotely for this kind of project?

Open source initiatives from a big corp usually gets a certain budget, and while there’s goals and strategic decisions, it can also just be discretionary.

I love Blender so much.

This will not end well. I hope I am wrong. Blender for me is the beacon of FOSS, but recent advancements in software are creating tons of pressure to sustain quality and adding new features is costly. In my view they must make proprietary version to bootstrap market expansion. I hope that I will not have to use Amazon Blender Suite as another cloud service.

That doesn't make sense to me. For one, Blender is GPL. For another, Amazon is hardly the first big company to sponsor Blender development: Facebook, AMD, NVidia, Unity, Epic, Intel, Microsoft, Google, etc. all contribute. They contribute because better free software for 3D modelling helps grow their own markets, for games, VR, graphics cards, gaming PCs, consoles, cloud gaming, visual effects, cloud rendering, etc. Amazon's The Man in the High Castle series used Blender for almost all its visual effects, and they sell cloud rendering services.

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