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Pick a Project

Once you have blender compiled you're probably wondering where to start tinkering. If you are a Blender user then there is probably some niggling thing you would like to add or change. If you are new to Blender then you will need to take a look and see what you might work on.

There are no hard and fast rules about where to start, so find an area that interests you and start looking into it.

Some hints for your first projects:

  • An area of interest (even better, an area of Blender you use)
  • Double check it is not already done.
  • Try to avoid a project that spans across many files and areas of Blender, since you may get bogged down trying to understand everything at once.

Here are some areas that can give you a foot in the door:

Small Improvements

Adding in small features or making small improvements is a good way to start getting your hands dirty, even if you don't contribute the changes. The feature you worked on can evolve into something more useful, take a new direction, or spark interest in new areas to develop.

There is a list of quick hacks - tasks that core developers think could be reasonably tackled as a first blender project without a major time commitment. These tasks typically would take a core developer less than 4 hours to accomplish, but might take quite a bit more time for a new coder who needs to learn the code base.

When using Blender you might run into some simple limitation - Lasso select tool didn't work on UV editor for example, or that the smooth tool doesn't work on a lattice. Making improvements like this is good because you're working within the current design and there's a much higher chance of having your work accepted.

Bug Fixing

One of the easiest ways to get involved with coding Blender is by fixing bugs. Bug fixing lets you focus on a small part of the Blender source rather than trying to understand it all at once. The list of current bugs is on projects.blender.org.

Bug fixes may range from trivial to highly complicated. Recently reported bugs tend to be simpler to resolve.

So pick an area of interest and start fixing! When you have got it, make a pull request.

If you can't find a fix, posting your finding to the bug report can still help others make progress.

Using a debugger helps investigating crashing and stepping through the code. See the tooling page for some information about debugging tools.

Janitor Work

Some more mundane tasks can also be helpful and a good way to get your first patch accepted.

  • Tooltip or spelling corrections.
  • Fixes and improvements to the build system.
  • Quiet compiler warnings.

Advice

  • In most cases we suggest to start really small and treat it as an exercise, your first project may not end up being useful and even things you would expect to be easy might not be. This also helps you become used to navigating the source code, reading it, making edits - and understanding it. While you do this you can think of more ambitious/interesting things to change too, so this time isn't wasted.

  • Avoid small patches which only tweak existing behavior or tweaks to defaults (early on at least). These kinds of changes are very easy for existing developers to make, so it's not really all that helpful to send such opinionated patches.

    It's common for people to come to Blender from other software and want to make it work how they like, but it's not the purpose of Blender to be a clone of another application. At least learn the Blender way before trying to make Blender behave like some other application, perhaps what you want can be done with key-map modifications, or added as a user preference, but to start with it's best to avoid controversial changes.

  • For a definitive answer on whether your project might be accepted - get in contact with the developers who would reviewer your work.