Ton Roosendaal

Ton Roosendaal
Ton Roosendaal, 2008
Born	(1960-03-20) 20 March 1960 (age 56)
Occupation	Chairman, Blender Foundation
Known for	Blender, Elephants Dream, Big Buck Bunny, Yo Frankie!, Sintel, Tears of Steel

Ton Roosendaal (Dutch: [tɔn ˈroːsɛnˌdaːl]; born 20 March 1960) is a Dutch software developer and film producer. He is known as the original creator of the open-source 3D creation suite Blender and Traces (an Amiga ray tracer which was the forerunner of Blender), he is also known as the chairman of the Blender Foundation, and for pioneering large scale open-content projects. In 2007 he established the Blender Institute in Amsterdam, where he works on coordinating Blender development, publishing manuals and DVD training, and organizing 3D animation and game projects.

Roosendaal studied Industrial Design in Eindhoven, before founding the animation studio "NeoGeo" in 1989. It quickly became the largest 3D animation studio in the Netherlands. At NeoGeo, Roosendaal was responsible for software development, in 1989 he wrote a ray tracer called Traces for Amiga and in 1995 he decided to start the development of an in-house software tool for 3D animation, based on the Traces and tools that NeoGeo had already written. This tool was later named "Blender". In January 1998, a free version of Blender was released on the internet, followed by versions for Linux and FreeBSD in April. Shortly after that, NeoGeo was taken over by another company in parts. This was when Ton Roosendaal and Frank van Beek decided to found a company called Not a Number (NaN) to further market and develop Blender. NaN's business model involved providing commercial products and services around Blender. In 2000 the company secured growth financing by several investment companies. The target of this was to create a free creation tool for interactive 3D (online) content, and commercial versions of the software for distribution and publishing. Roosendaal moved to Amsterdam in 2002.

Due to low sales and the ongoing difficult economic climate, the NaN investors decided to shut down all operations in January/February 2002. This meant that the development of Blender would be ended. However, in May 2002, with support from the user community and customers, Ton Roosendaal founded the non-profit Blender Foundation.