A deal was reached with the company’s investors to initiate a fund-raising campaign to buy back the rights to Blender, at a cost of ?100,000. Thanks to an enthusiastic group of volunteers including several ex-NaN employees, along with donations from thousands of loyal Blender supporters, the ?100,000 target was reached in seven short weeks. Blender was then freely released to the world under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Since 2002, Ton is working full time employed by the Blender Foundation to coordinate Blender projects, ranging from software development to manual publishing.

Ton was the producer of Elephants Dream, responsible for planning, overall coordination and ?big picture? decisions. Ton was also the lead software developer for the project.

Peter has a Ph.D. in Applied Physics and did graduate research in developing algorithms to simulate protein molecules. He is currently employed as a programmer, creating data analysis software for use by biologists.

Art of Illusion

Peter became interested in 3D graphics after taking a class on computer graphics during graduate school. Frustrated by the state of user interfaces in 3D modeling tools available at the time, he decided to write his own modeling software.

Art of Illusion, the result of his efforts, now averages about 200-300 downloads per day.