Yet another Blender developer getting a job at Solid Angle

[Mathaeus]

This time, Blender's No.1, Brecht van Lommel . More about in Blender nation article.
From my understanding, even his work was mainly related to Cycles renderer, in reality he was a sort of prime minister of mr. Roosendaal's land. As personal comment, Cycles thing definitively gave a 'look' to many Blender works we can see all around. But, imho, choice of slow, solely path-tracer, also was a show stopper for using this app in any small production. To explain this in another way, I've chosed to buy Modo, after a few tests of Blender's Cycles.

[Hirazi Blue]

Didn't Brecht van Lommel work for Refractive software (Octane renderer) for a while,
before returning to the Blender Institute and releasing Cycles?
I vaguely recall not everybody at Refractive was very happy about the way this played out...
;)

[Mathaeus]

so, an interesting career In my crystal ball, I think I see the word 'Autodesk', somehow related to this story in future

[bb3d]

Bad news. This is how great open source projects get destroyed by companies... not by buying the whole software, but by headhunting the developers.
Probably SA needs Brecht's experience with GPU computing which could lead to the assumption that there will be a GPU accelerated version of Arnold in the near future.