JT Nelson

JT Nelson founded the SoCal Blender Group in early 2010 as an umbrella group and website for what was then a scattered open-source movement in Southern California, and he has spent the 16 years since organizing the region’s open-source media community. The group’s stated commitment is “supporting the people of the region and providing opportunities they might not otherwise have by way of open creative media production” — a constituency of freelance artists, contractors and technical consultants working in Hollywood production, most of whom have no institutional employer to supply them with tools, training or computing capacity.

That gap is the through-line of his work. Nelson is a named co-author, with the branch’s principal developer Martin Felke, of the pie-menu add-on for the Blender Fracture Modifier — the destruction-simulation branch of the open-source 3D suite Blender — and he maintains its documentation wiki. At SCALE 16x, the Southern California Linux Expo held in Pasadena in March 2018, he gave two talks on the same afternoon: “Democratizing Hollywood and Game Industry Technology with Open Source,” on how boutique studios use Blender, Krita and Linux in the cloud to compete on award-nominated work, and “Busting Things Up with the Fracture Modifier VFX Branch of blender 3D.” The year before, he had presented “Decentralization and Democratization of Animation and VFX Technology” at Pasadena Media as part of Innovate Pasadena’s Connect 17 series.

His most sustained work is the least visible. Nelson has attended Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Committee meetings almost continuously since Jan. 30, 2020, appearing in 136 of the 191 published meeting records through Aug. 19, 2026 — listed each time as representing the Pasadena Open Source consortium and the SoCal Blender group. The ASWF is the Linux Foundation body that governs the open-source software the motion picture industry runs on, including OpenEXR, OpenColorIO, OpenTimelineIO and Universal Scene Description. Nelson attends as a community participant rather than a member organization’s delegate, and the minutes record him routing work between projects: flagging renderer adoption of Open Shading Language, identifying Blender-community contributors for the OpenTimelineIO incubation review, and in January 2026 volunteering to lead the integration of a donated vegetation toolset into the Open 3D Engine.

He describes his own professional work, on the record at a March 2024 TAC meeting, as contracting “in the IT, security and dataservices channels,” with a focus on helping third-party content-creation studios meet the motion picture industry’s security compliance requirements. Alongside SoCal Blender he is a founding participant in two municipal open-source consortia — the Pasadena Open Source consortium, which he represents at the ASWF, and the Glendale Open Source Consortium, formed by community stakeholders at Glendale Tech Week in 2024 to route the value of open-source software into that city’s technology sector across AI, robotics, media and web. He convened the consortium’s one-year retrospective at Glendale Tech Week in 2025.