Creator Showcase - Cogumelo Softworks

Creatorshowcases are our way of giving extra attention to outstanding creators here on the Blender Market. These creators go above and beyond our high standards in both product quality and support.  Cogumelo Softworks, creators of BakeTool, has very quickly become one of the top creators on the Blender Market. This is attributed to not only the great work they did on the BakeTool but also on their stellar support and continued updates to the add-on.

Your company, Cogumelo Softworks seems to do some really nice work! Can you tell us a bit about what you and your company does and how you got started?

First thanks for the invitation for this interview. We are a small start-up company from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and we started in the business incubator of the INT (Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia / Nacional Technology Institute) a Brazilian federal institute of research and support for technology projects. Today we work developing mostly 3D interactive ambient and software for Engineering, Arch Viz, Bio-medicine and Military Applications.

You and your team are based in Brazil, which seems to be a fast emerging market in both Blender and CG in general. In fact, it's one of the top six countries for traffic towards CG Cookie. What has your experience been working, as a professional artist and studio, in Brazil been like?

As a company working with technological innovation, Brazil is great. The Brazilian people are very creative and opened for smart and innovative solutions, beside there's a lot of unexplored markets to discover yet. Since interactive 3D solutions cross every area of the society from entertainment, scientific, education and military applications. We are very excited about what we can do here. For that task Blender is crucial, most of our workflow is based in Blender and other open source software like Inkscape and GIMP but we work too with great commercial applications like Unity3D. Blender has a really huge community here in Brazil, I can say for sure that it's one of the largest in the world and it's just growing up every day. A lot of studios like Cogumelo are using Blender as the main 3D Tool here in Brazil.

BakeTool, your first (and currently only) product here on the Blender Market is doing very well. In just a few weeks it has become the 2nd best-selling product on the market. Is there anything you'd like to share from your experience thus far that other creators might learn from? Why has BakeTool done so well? What made you decide to start building it?

I think it done well because it meets a community call. The point is that we do not did it just for sell, we did it mostly for own use. Actually we use Baketool (and BoolTool) everyday here in Cogumelo. Today the Cycles Bake system is very confusing, it's almost unusable in complex scenes. Since we needed a reliable and better bake system for our jobs we decided to do it by ourselves. The idea to sell it to get some funds and keep developing it after. Without the Blendermarket it never would be in a releasable state and would be just an in house solution as many we have. Getting it supported by buyers allows us to invest more time on it, make a better UI, functions and a more stable system. Today we are very proud of the BakeTool as a tool and product, the sale numbers are just a consequence of it. Now BakeTool is the first unified Bake system for both Blender Internal Render and Cycles, that's one of the features that never would be done without help of the community buyers and more features will come. If I can give a tip for developers that want to have successful products I would say "Make quality products that meets the needs and speed up people's work".

Do you have plans for any other add-ons? And if so, can you tease any previews?

Today we are focused in make BakeTool the best Bake Solution for Blender users. The 1.2 version was released with BI support and we have a roadmap for 1.3 already that include Bake Animation support. Beside BakeTool we're working on a new addon that we think people will love, but it is early to talk more about it ;) 

Cogumelo Softworks BakeTool is a great add-on that's well worth checking out. Thank you, Cogumelo Softworks for taking the time to answer our questions. Is there another creator you think should be showcased? Let us know in the comments!