Domino's Blender sculptie scripts need your support to continue!

Forgive me for taking this liberty, but I feel it's something that really needs to be addressed, and must be in this forum for visibility as it's somewhat crucial to sculptie dev's out there.

Just earlier this month, Domino's internet was in danger of being cut off. If it weren't for a certain SL creator who wanted to return the favor of usage of these scripts for his work in SL, we might not have had Domino as a developer come the end of this month. The danger light is off for a little while, but it won't last forever.

Between not being able to work for half a year due to debilitating carpel tunnel, and dealing with hospital stuff for it, Domino's still come through and reworked his entire sculptie development, pausing mostly only for letting his wrists rest. I've witnessed bug turnarounds in mere hours- and the new mailing list is very active. He honestly loves what he does, and really is doing it for nothing right now- but he can't keep doing it forever without some kind of support. That's just reality.

The new git repository scripts support a staggering range of features that are either in progress or being polished. Full blown export is one of them, as are oblongs, automatic alpha protection, a new library of sculpts to start from, LOD preview, dead on accuracy- and the list goes on, especially when you look under the hood to see what's done for future developers interested in plugins.

And it's all currently free and open source.

Domino's work is one of the most powerful renders out there- and having it available on Blender means -everybody- has access to it. Nobody is left out. With Gaia's videos, the learning barrier itself is being leveled. If we lose him, we'll lose someone who's enabled us to be on the bleeding edge of sculpt development for literally nothing.

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As content creators we get to see direct sales. Pass a bit of it on to the people who make it possible for you to do these things in SL.

In a recent email, Domino mentioned to me that he gets about 1000 downloads of his scripts per month, if each of those people gave 100L, he could keep doing what he's doing. Depending on what you make, that's like, one sale. Less than a dollar. That's not even vendor space per week in some instances. I would definitely support some kind of monthly drive for supporting development.


I've put in my donation, if you'd like to help out, you can send L inworld to "Domino Marama" or hit up his paypal:

http://dominodesigns.info/second_life/blender_scripts.html (look to the middle right of your screen where it says "Donate"

Worst case scenario is if there's no support, the scripts become for pay, or they disappear altogether. You're not only helping yourself by ensuring the future of the development, but making it possible for newbies to get their feet wet, just as you did. I think part of what can make a community strong is for it to recognize its key members and repay some of their hard work.

-- Raz!

Hi, all

I would like to add that we currently see about 11000 hits per month on the machinimatrix blog. On average we can see 5-10 direct jump-offs per day to Domino's scripts repository. And we can see 100-200 direct downloads of our videos per day (since almost 12 months now, slowly raising). Recently we hit the 100.000 click border! Of course you can imagine, that here at machinimatrix there is lots of appreciation to Domino's work too, otherwise i would not be able to put so much work into the tutorials...

There is also the owner of machinimatrix, who silently pays for internet access, administrative support, SL (he sponsors the JASS-sim, my private playground), my computer and as an enthusiast himself, he teached me in countless hours how to make machinima and such just for making better tutorials...

And there is Jass-1 now, the binary distribution of a ready-made blender with domino's recent RC-scripts. All for free and all to keep up domino's tremendious usefull toolkit and make it even more usefull with even less effort...

Recently i started asking for donations for the video making. We have seen about 1300 Linden dollars in total over the last 3 months, sponsored by ~3 people. And while seeing virtually no income from the donations, we seriously started thinking about concepts for commercial offerings but honestly i think, that will be no easy task at all! ...

So lets hope that some more people are willing to directly sponsor domino. And if we ever can sell something based on Domino's scripts, i am certain, that the machinimatrix will forward rewards to him too!

And ...of course... All good wishes for your Health, Domino!!!

Cheers,
Gaia

It's sad that people have to be prodded and pushed into doing the right thing for open source creators. I've posted my thoughts on this to the Area55 mailing list.

http://www.dominodesigns.info/mail.cgi/archive/area55/20090628052003/

Done.



-L

Much appreciated Leben ^^! I think it would be a great idea for everyone who donates to say so here, for some recognition. So its encouraged that you post here to visibly show your support off to everyone!

The machinimatrix has decided to give it a try and we have just changed our usage policies. We now recommend our users to "pay after view". And all income until end of july will be 100% forwarded to Domino Designs, see:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/donate/

Furthermore one machinimatrix-team member has already donated a significant amount of US dollars to make a beginning. And the team has decided to add the same amount of money into the jackpot, as we will recieve through payments until end of july. So we will actually double the amount of payment that will be transfered to Domino.

Ok, there is a restiction: "we will double up only to an upper limit of 1000 US-Dollar in the jackpot". ermm... yes,yes, i admit that we are quite optimistic here

So let us hope that this move of the machinimatrix will add a bit of driving force ...

Cheers,
Gaia

Thanks Gaia and the machinimatrix crew, I look forward to seeing how well it goes.

To put this thread into some sort of context, I've just used David A. Wheeler's 'SLOCCount' to estimate the cost of development for Primstar.

Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 2,856
Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) = 0.60 (7.22)
(Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05))
Schedule Estimate, Years (Months) = 0.44 (5.30)
(Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.3)
Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 81,318
(average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).

http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/

And that's not taking into account how much time I've spent supporting it which is at least half as much again.

Hi, all;

I just wanted to remind you on the ongoing machinimatrix initiative at

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/

We allready have collected about 300 US-Dollar from 19 kind persons,
who try to help Domino to get along with his work.

Maybe all others who have been using Domino's scripts and watching our tutorials could think about donating at least 100 L$ for each machinimatrix video you have seen and found usefull for your work. Hey folks, 100 L$ is ~25 Euro-Cent or ~30 US-Cent. That's fairly low, don't you think ?

I will pass every L$ i receive until end of July into the Domino Fund. And Every Linden which you donate will be doubled by the machinimatrix so that Domino will get a significant sum at the end...

Please spread the word and also ask your friends to donate. I expect to see at least 100 Donations, so come on and do it

Cheers,
Gaia

Only one week left to get the value of your donation doubled!

I've decided to add a little incentive, see http://dominodesigns.info/ for more info...