Why is it so hard to find Python programmers for Blender?

Lately most of the folks who helped me with add-ons in the past (free of charge or paid) abandoned programming for Blender (for various reasons).

It seems almost impossible to find anyone who can program add-ons for Blender nowadays (again, free or paid). Why do you think it’s the case ?

Go to a pet shop and ask the person for a hamster, those critters love to run remaining in the same place.

I add a demo reel of some candidates which, in my opinion, show potential:

There are fewer Blender Python coders than there are Blender users who use Python… if that makes any sense. A lot (most?) of the people who write Python scripts and add-ons do so for their own projects, so what they write is often project-specific and they don’t have an abundance of time to write code for projects outside of their own.

There are a few people who focus on the Blender Python API (rather than Blender as a whole), but since there are so few, they also tend to be busy.

So in other words the software service ecosystem around Blender is pretty much non-existent and BF pretty much doesn’t care :confused:

I wouldn’t go that far. I mean, this is the sort of thing that the Blender Network was set up to facilitate.

I noticed that the BF didn’t post a news update on how the Blender Network was doing since December of last year, even though they recently posted how the Blender Cloud service was doing. Is there going to be one soon or are they sharply reducing the frequency of posts now?

As I mentioned in another thread (you might have deleted my post), only a handful of people from the Network (BF members who don’t do freelance projects) could actually develop add-ons. The rest of the folks told me they don’t do that (they only mention Python skill as a mean to automate some routine tasks when they need to).

Btw, I googled for MEL programmers and I got a ton of resumes. Some do both MEL/MaxScript and Python (for Maya). Maybe, if I am lucky, one of those folks could actually help me with add-ons for Blender. Just pretty sad that Blender lacks in offering software development services (perhaps it has to do with Blender not being widely use in the industries).

Understandable, but I’m not sure it’s justifiable to lay that at the feet of the BF. Beyond the Blender Network, what exactly would you have them do?

Perhaps rather than attempting to engage people with specific interests in Blender’s Python API, maybe it’s more effective to find people adept in Python and draw them into the Blender world.

That’s what I am gonna have to try doing.

Check the authors of some of the addons submitted at developer.blender.org

https://developer.blender.org/maniphest/project/3/type/Patch/

Python is relatively well documented
the blender API is something else !

you can always ask help in the python’s forum and hope someone is available !

I do some basic addons for myself and help when ever I can
but don’t always have the time too!

happy bl

I wish I could - there is no way to contact people from the bug tracker. I logged in, skimmed over a few folks - no “send PM” or “send e-mail” option and no profile info (unless it’s not being show there).

I guess if I had 48 hrs a day and no day job (and no family perhaps), I’d do it all by myself (and I’d certainly ask in Python support section of the forum) :wink:

I have never even blown the dust off the bpy api,

I have been to intrested in bge python, however I am to the point where there is not a lot left to learn left in BGE api, I’ll crack the BPY api tonight and check it out.

what are you trying to write?

One of the projects is this: https://vimeo.com/123883474

Another project is turning Blender into a level editor. I have working exporters, but a lot of functionality is missing (texturing tools, reading entities’ from ascii files in the game’s folder and so on) and at some point it should be one-click export (calling other exported to export into appropriate formats).

And how much are you willing to pay for something like that?

It’s not how much I am willing to pay - it’s how much programmer charges me. Currently I work with game engine software engineer (and previously worked with other folks on the same basis) and the way we work is I determine the scope, he determines the hours and the project kicks out if we both agree on the final numbers.

Note I already have basic version of the morphing-2-skeletal script. It’s just not as advanced as it could be and usability is pretty bad (no UI, no settings).

Usually I create a test case that works when applied manually, and when workflow is determined, programmer automates as much as possibly can be done in Blender, and wraps it into UI.

My personal opinion on this, which may not apply to other developers:

I have near-zero confidence in the “API” (if you even go as far as calling it that) and consequently near-zero confidence in my ability to make an estimate on whether a project is even feasible, much less how much it would cost.

There are lots of things that one would reasonably expect to be able to do in a simple way, which are either very convoluted or impossible. That wouldn’t even be so bad, if it didn’t also take a lot of work figuring out what you can and can’t do. All operators pollute the API docs even if they can’t really be used from a script, but only from the GUI. The actual functionality they wrap is often only accessible through C. To work around that you end up trying to figure out how to get Blender into a state where the operator does not fail because of an invalid context, which pretty much requires reading the C code. This way of working is incredibly frustrating and wasteful. It also requires you to accumulate a lot of otherwise useless domain-specific knowledge. Blender works completely unlike anything a normal programmer would be used to. This isn’t true for all of the API (modules like bmesh are more reasonable to work with), but for the most of Blender’s functionality, it is.

So for me personally, this large risk in terms of opportunity cost is what would keep me away from addon development. That’s not necessarily a constraint independent addon developers face, so you can still see lots of addons developed. What you don’t see is the addons not developed, or the frustrations those developers are facing (unless they post a rant about it, like I just did).

Well Campbell himself agrees that the API is crap compared to what it could be, but the issue is that writing Python API functions and concepts for addon developers is one of those tasks where it is hard to find someone with an interest in developing.

Unless the BF can find a way to double the size of the core team or dramatically increase the number of highly active volunteers, Blender is not going to escape the ‘lack of resources’ issue.