Brecht is leaving (or already left) BF - what does it mean to Blender?

So I opened BN site this morning and I saw that Brecht left Blender development (Cycles in particular). Does it mean that until BF finds suitable replacement, Cycles will stagnate ?

http://blender-podcast.org/?p=620

Can’t listen to podcast - at work :slight_smile:

Well get to work instead of checking BA:o

Basically, Dingto and Sergey will continue working with cycles. Sergey supposedly taking a larger role. Other developers also taking larger role if possible.
Brecht has been planning departure for 5 months already and worked to leave Cycles with most of big/complex features implemented and stable. Brecht leave to seek new adventure and work with knowledgeable team at Solid Angle.

Did you even read the announcement?

There’s a handful of people working on Cycles.
Brecht debriefed Sergey on how to lead the cycles project, and where it should be taken next.
DingTo is working on tons of small features as a GSoC student.
There’s Stormst who’s working on an improvement on the base path tracing algorithms.
There’s Dalai who’s working on Baking.
Brecht said he would keep functioning as advisor.

Cycles isn’t going to stagnate anytime soon.

EDIT: What Rys said.

Aside from render side sub-division which we will get with OpenSubdiv support in cycles and displacement isn’t Cycles pretty much feature complete especially on the CPU side.

Hair was from another developer, Thomas is working on some cycles features for GSOC and there is another developer working on MLT.

Personally what I would love to see with regards to Cycles is exporters of other software; Maya, Max, Cinema4D, Modo, Sketchup, Daz3D .Surely there is a business opportunity there, couldn’t someone develop plugins and charge for them. Nathan Letwory is working integrating Cycles in Rhino. Exposing Cycles to other users can only be good.

Aye, cool stuff.

The Blender/Cycles team must be doing something right, Solid Angle is keeping a close eye on the developers :stuck_out_tongue:

Congratulations to Brecht.

You know the drill, Brecht will be gone for about a year and then return to the BF with a new render engine that blow everyone’s mind. :wink:

I’m pretty sure that Arnold is more the type of engine that he prefers to work on as part of a paid team than Octane is, simply because it follows a vision that has a number of similarities to Cycles.

When he left to work on Octane even, on the back of my mind was an understanding of the possibility as to why he wouldn’t want to deal with BI anymore (Octane’s clean and modern codebase vs. a hack-filled mess that read to the render25 project failing). The BF was fortunate to see him come back and long enough to put together a fully-featured modern rendering solution for Blender.

A second thought after the news. The day after.
You know the ancient myth of Hydra?
Cut one head, not very wise.

monsterdog - why do you assume that Solid Angle contacted Brecht and offered him a job? I think it was the other way round.

Because Brecht is a brilliant developer. Not easy to find many like him around.

While he was very good at render code, we need to be reminded that as talented as he is, he wasn’t a magician.

I say that because there were concepts that even he struggled to resolve at times, it will be the same with DingTo, Sergey, Broadstu, Lukas Stockner, and anyone else who joins the Cycles development effort. We’re simply not going to get a developer who can just think of something and code it in a flawless fashion without blinking.

Now by no means should we be saying that it will be impossible to get another developer close to Brecht’s caliber (not with the record number of budding developers with working knowledge of pathtracers being minted nowadays), but the only way we would surely reap the maximum number of benefits from such a person is through ensuring that the BF has enough income to give him a full time development spot.

Now by no means should we be saying that it will be impossible to get another developer close to Brecht’s caliber (not with the record number of budding developers with working knowledge of pathtracers being minted nowadays), but the only way we would surely reap the maximum number of benefits from such a person is through ensuring that the BF has enough income to give him a full time development spot.

+1
Ace, this is why I posted the Hydra image.

Brecht is an amazing developer, with both skill and vision, and will be definitely missed. Still, it’s probably the right time to read/re-read this last year post about Top 20 Blender developers 2013: let’s not forget, there’s quite a few people behind Blender


This is purely my speculation. I think that one of the main reasons why they hired him because Cycles was getting way too good, rather a treat to commercial renderers. He deserves the job more than anyone else. However I tend to see a cynical side in it as well. This is more similar to Sculptris vs Pixologic.In any case we can only wish the best for him.

For the type of audience that Arnold targets, I can honestly say that they don’t have ANYTHING to worry about from Cycles. Solid Angle has been incredibly supportive of Cycles as a whole (we even use some of their algorithms!). They simply saw an excellent render developer and made him an offer.

as a capitalist i love the move

And last I read, Brecht will still be involved in Cycles development, he just won’t be writing any code himself (ie. being more in a advisory position in terms of code and implementations by other developers).