Truly an iconic man he was the person who brought us blender and with the help of the community gave us a free 3d modeling software, that rivals no one but instead was built for the public by the public.
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.
