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 in art and technology lab, and pushes the boundaries of 3D 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, CRETA 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 a start in software development by

creating mods and running servers for Gary'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 want to 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 it's 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 20 years, I think now, for creating actual open projects with Blender making short films mainly.

And recently we've also done a game.

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