Top 30 committers 2023

While the year runs on its last legs, it’s time to celebrate another fantastic Blender year – made possible by the community of contributors at blender.org.

Below is the list of top committers to the Blender project in 2023. The number of commits obviously doesn’t mean much, but it’s a neutral metric to put a limelight on people who made Blender possible last year.

Out of these 30 developers, 25 contributed while being employed by Blender Institute (BI), or being supported with a Blender Foundation (BF) Development Fund grant.

Dalai Felinto (62, Brazil, BI employee)

Dalai worked on overall planning, prioritization and communication, specifically for the team in the Amsterdam HQ. He is also the product manager for the Geometry Nodes project.

Aras Pranckevicius (76, Lithuania, volunteer)

Aras loves to improve performance and is always up for a good code challenge. This year he optimized parts of the video sequence editor and continued contributions to file I/O such as PLY and STL formats.

Joseph Eagar (83, USA, dev grant)

Joseph worked on sculpting features and dynamic topology.

Lukas Stockner (88, Germany, dev grant)

Lukas worked on a new iteration of the Principled BSDF for Cycles and EEVEE, making it faster and more realistic.

Lukas Tönne (95, Germany, BI employee)

Lukas is part of the Nodes & Physics module and worked on node panels and simulations, among other things.

Pratik Borhade (96, India, dev grant)

Pratik is part of the triaging team, making sure bug reports get triaged and fixed as quickly as possible. He also contributed to the Grease Pencil V3 project this year.

Ray Molenkamp (107, Canada, volunteer)

Ray leads the platform module and is the go-to person in the Blender chat channels. Ask him anything, he knows! He also keeps a close eye on the windows platform, ensuring it works smooth as butter!

Richard Antalík (110, Czech Republic, dev grant)

Richard is part of the triaging team and contributes code to the video sequencer. This year he contributed a new system for interactively retiming strips.

Omar Emara (112, Egypt, dev grant)

Omar implemented the new realtime compositor system and ported almost all existing nodes to it, making it easier and more fun for artists to add post effects.

Weizhen Huang (123, Germany, BI employee)

Weizhen contributed to the Cycles renderer and helped with many lights sampling and also implemented her own paper to the Principled Hair BSDF, adding a new “Huang” model to it.

Damien Picard (125, France, volunteer)

Damien helped with bug fixing and the translation of Blender’s UI into other languages.

Jason Fielder (126, UK)

Jason contributed to Blender’s Metal Backend, making Blender ready for the future on macOS. Thanks to him and his colleagues at Apple for their contribution!

Chris Blackbourn (136, New Zealand, dev grant)

Chris improved Blender’s UV tools and made packing considerably faster and smarter.

Iliya Katushenock(141, Russia, volunteer)

Iliya is a contributor to the geometry nodes project and helped with fixes, performance improvements, and new features.

Sybren A. Stüvel (173, Netherlands, BI employee)

Sybren is leading the Animation module and the efforts for the Animation 2025 project. He also works on the Flamenco render farm manager.

Philipp Oeser (174, Germany, BI employee)

Philipp is the lead of the triaging team. He is also responsible for the LTS updates, bringing more stability to Blender users every month!

Christoph Lendenfeld (184, Spain, dev grant)

Christoph is part of the animation module. Among other things, this year Christoph made the dope sheet and graph editor rendering much faster.

Miguel Pozo (194, Spain, dev grant)

Miguel is part of the EEVEE & Viewport module and has been an important part of the EEVEE Next development project.

Falk David (220, Germany, BI employee)

Falk’s main project for the year has been leading the Grease Pencil V3 rewrite project.

Harley Acheson (263, Canada, dev grant)

Harley has an eye for details. He improved and fixed areas in Blenders UI this year, giving users a more polished and focused experience. He also contributed to a better UI font system again, with a new default font and support for more languages.

Sergey Sharybin (283, Russia, BI employee)

Sergey contributed to motion tracking, Cycles rendering, and sculpting. In particular, light and shadow linking was a feature many people have been waiting for!

Julian Eisel (298, Germany, BI employee)

Working on Blender’s user interface, this year Julian focused on the asset system and the new asset shelf. He also contributed significantly to a new developer documentation platform.

Germano Cavalcante (315, Brazil, dev grant)

Germano is part of the triaging team and also helps with bug fixing. He also made significant improvements to the transform system, including the base point snapping feature.

Brecht Van Lommel (316, Belgium, BI employee)

Among many other areas, Brecht worked on Cycles this year and contributed significantly to the developer website backend.

Clément Foucault (331, France, BI employee)

Clément worked on a major rewrite of the EEVEE realtime renderer to take advantage of modern GPU features and to add new features like screen space global illumination and displacement.

Bastien Montagne (402, France, BI employee)

Bastien is an owner of the core module, his main concern is to keep Blender files and overrides working.

Jeroen Bakker (429, Netherlands, BI employee)

Jeroen is part of the rendering team, the go-to person for everything viewport and GPU related. He worked on Vulkan support this year.

Jacques Lucke (489, Germany, BI employee)

This year, Jacques worked on geometry nodes features including baking, simulations, and the repeat zone. He also improved menu search, and moved most of Blender’s C code to C++.

Hans Goudey (1383, USA, dev grant)

Besides contributing various geometry nodes features like node tools and asset integration, Hans enjoys refactoring Blender to improve performance and modernize code. This year he finished a large change to Blender’s mesh storage.

Campbell Barton (2017, Australia, dev grant)

Campbell contributes to nearly every core module in Blender. This year he worked on Wayland support and the extentions platform project.

I wish all of the people above and everyone who contributed to Blender a healthy and happy 2024!

Thomas Dinges

Blender Development Coordinator