Blender and Godot in Game Development with Simon Thommes

Blender Studio is the creative arm of the Blender Foundation, and it's dedicated to producing films, games, and other projects that showcase the full potential of Blender. The studio functions as both an art and technology lab and pushes the boundaries of three d animation through open productions. All of their assets, production files, and workflows are shared publicly, which gives artists and developers valuable resources to learn from and build upon. Most recently, Blender Studio released its second game, Dog Walk, where the playable character is a dog exploring snowy winter woods with a child. The project was built entirely with open source tools, including Blender, the Godot engine, Krita for concept art, Kitsu for project management, and Linux. Simone Thomas is a lead technical artist at Blender Studio and a developer on Dogwalk. He joins the podcast with Joe Nash to talk about Blender Studio, the process behind building Dogwalk and developing a pipeline between Blender and Godot. Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award winning community builder who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry's Mod. And game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts. Simon, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. I wanna ask you what your role is and what you do, but I guess to set the context for that, for folks who aren't aware, can you run us through what Blender Studio is and how it sits and is different from Blender itself? Yeah. It's probably a good idea. A lot of people that we talk to are not actually aware that Blender is also doing its own content creation. And, yeah, that's done in the form of the Blender Studio. The Blender Studio has been existing for almost twenty years, I think now, for creating actual open projects with Blender, making short films mainly. And recently, we've also done a game. There's been a game before. But the whole concept of the Blender Studio is to support the development of the Blender software by actually testing out the features that are being developed as they're being developed. So we're always on the latest main branch of the software, not waiting for releases. So we're immediately testing the features as they make it into Blender, and at the same time, also pushing the development into different directions. The idea is also to focus on various different art styles and just general themes with the project that we're doing to make sure that Blender is usable in all sorts of different branches. And at the same time, we're also using a full open source pipeline for our project. So anything of course, Blender, being open source, is our main tool. But for anything else that we do, it's like concept art. We use Krita. For our production management, we use Kitsu, which is also open source. We're …