Below is the list of top committers to the Blender project in 2021. The amount of commits obviously doesn’t mean much, but it’s a neutral metric to put limelight on people who made Blender possible last year.
An interesting trend is that out of these 30 names, 24 developers were employed by Blender Institute (BI) or work with a Blender Foundation Development Fund grant. I am very happy that we can support so many people now.
Another interesting trend for 2021, which does not show in the statistics yet, is that we get increasing development attention (patches and commits) from larger corporations. In alphabetical order I wanted to thank the developers from AMD (GPU support for Cycles), Meta (Cycles performance), Intel (Cycles, rendering and CPU optimization) and Nvidia (GPU and ray-tracing support for Cycles, USD).
Alexander Gavrilov (43)
Russia, developer, independent. Alexander is an active member of the Animation and Rigging module.
Howard Trickey (44)
USA, developer, independent. Howard is owner of the Modeling module and an enthusiast mentor of new developers.
Charlie Jolly (49)
UK, developer, Independent. Charlie is an all-round developer contributing patches in many areas of Blender, including GPencil and Geometry Nodes.
Pablo Vazquez (50)
Argentina, Blender evangelist and part time developer, BI employee. Aside from his work on blender.org communication and video streams, Pablo is a member of the UI module, contributing to the 3.0 looks.
Pablo Dobarro (51)
Spain, principal developer, full-time grant (but now on a break). Pablo is the main contributor to sculpting and painting tools in Blender.
Ankit Meel (56)
India, developer, full-time grant. Ankit works on the trackers for triaging and bug fixing.
Falk David (60)
Germany, developer, part-time grant. Falk started as triager and developed interest in the GPencil module. He is now employed by a renowned Spanish animation studio to work on Blender.
Johnny Matthews (62)
USA, developer, independent. Johnny is back! As a regular contributor in the 2000s he still knows the Blender codebase very well. Johnny is a member of the Nodes and Physics module.
Ray Molenkamp (68)
Canada, developer, independent. Ray leads the platform module and is the go-to person in the Blender chat channels, ask him anything, he knows!
Sebastian Parborg (75)
Sweden, developer, Blender Studio employee. Sebastian is the main Studio connection with the developers, assisting the artists during production with bug and feature fixes. He is also coordinating the NPR rendering team.
Kévin Dietrich (92)
France, developer, full-time grant. Kévin works as a core team member of the Cycles module, working on production features and performance.
YimingWu (93)
China, developer, part-time development grant. Yiming is both an artist and a developer with special interest in line rendering.
Harley Acheson (95)
Canada, developer, independent. Harley is an active member of the UI module.
Dalai Felinto (99)
Brazil, development coordinator, BI employee. Dalai leads the BI developer team and is product designer for the Nodes project.
Manuel Castilla (103)
Spain, developer, half-time grant. Manual is a new member of the Compositor module in Blender, working alongside Jeroen.
Clément Foucault (142)
France, principal developer, BI employee. Clement is the lead designer of Eevee and GPU rendering in Blender. He works on Eevee 2.0 and viewport compositing, but his main accomplishment is the (ongoing) migration of OpenGL to Vulkan in Blender. This is expected to wrap in 2022.
Aaron Carlisle (162)
USA, developer/writer, half-time grant. Aaron keeps the user manual on docs.blender.org working. He’s increasingly turning into an all-round developer.
Sergey Sharybin (210)
Russia, principal developer, BI employee. Sergey made a splash in 2021 by teaming up with Brecht redesigning and implementing the Cycles X rendering engine.
Richard Antalik (214)
Czech Republic, full time grant. Richard works as a triager and is the key contributor to video editing in Blender.
Antonio Vazquez (217)
Spain, senior developer, independent. Antonio is the lead developer of the Grease Pencil module in Blender. GPencil is a key reason for bigger studios to get into Blender. It all starts with concept artists and storyboarders!
Sybren A. Stüvel (266)
Netherlands, senior developer, BI employee. Sybren turned the animation module in Blender into one of the most active groups. He also leads USD efforts for Blender and heads up the Asset project.
Philipp Oeser (281)
Germany, developer, BI employee. Phillipp leads the triaging, bug fixing and patch reviewing efforts on blender.org.
Julian Eisel (362)
Germany, developer, BI employee. Julian is a core member of the UI module. Most of 2021 he worked on making the Asset browser in Blender work.
Germano Cavalcante (372)
Brazil, developer, full time grant. Germano’s main task is triaging and bug fixing, but is increasingly active in the modeling and rendering modules.
Jeroen Bakker (423)
Netherlands, senior developer, BI employee. Jeroen is part of the rendering team, the goto person for everything viewport and GPU related.
Brecht Van Lommel (424)
Belgium, principal developer, BI employee, rendering architect. Brecht made 2021 memorable with a highly sophisticated redesign of Cycles, embraced by all leading CPU/GPU manufacturers in the world.
Bastien Montagne (506)
France, developer, BI employee. Bastien is an owner of the core module, his main concern is to keep Blender files and overrides work.
Jacques Lucke (700)
Germany, senior developer, BI employee. Jacques is the lead engineer of the Geometry Nodes project.
Hans Goudey (854)
USA, developer, full time grant. Hans is a highly valued member of the Geometry Nodes project.
Campbell Barton (1873)
Australia, principal developer, full time grant. Campbell is indispensable, he contributes to nearly every core module in Blender.
I wish all of the people above, and everyone who contributed to Blender a healthy and happy 2022!
Ton Roosendaal
Amsterdam, 31-12-2021