I do. But I also have convictions, and if I want this project to become viable in the long run, I have to know if people validate my Open Source "vision" first, and how far I can bring this project by myself. 

If my current ideas are validated, and I am not just being an over-confident prick, I'll definitely upgrade BakeMyScan into something that I'll be able to gain money from in the long run, while keeping it Open Source and free to use. 

I don't want to become rich with BakeMyScan but in case of success, I will definitely find my best to make a living out of it. I want to be able to live doing what I love, and if I can afford a comfortable life doing so, I definitely will ;)

But let's focus on shipping a stable and fully-featured product before trying to make it into a source of revenue.

You definitely can, and by other means than donating.

"Have you told your friends?"

For now, and as I am going to keep on "prototyping" for a little while after having fixed issues, the possible best way to help me would be to cite BakeMyScan. #BakeMyScan. Made with BakeMyScan. BakeMyScan is cool. Have you tried BakeMyScan? Whatever, I'll take any advertisement if you enjoy my work ;)

This will be a great way to get attention on the project, allowing me to get more users, meaning more feedbacks, meaning a better tool !

Share your workflow tips !

I am not a 3D artist. So I definitely don't know what's best / most useful for you. I have ideas, and some of them might be great, but others will definitely prove pointless.

Hence, if you happen to use some cool workflows, smart succession of operations in blender, or use homemade or open source python scripts that you think could improve the "asset optimization" field, and if you are willing to share them to the community, I'd be glad to try and incorporate them into the addon, of course giving you a proper credit on a page I will have set up for the occasion.

I won't take into consideration every tip or trick though! I want to keep the addon coherent around asset optimization, so that all the operators make sense and can be used in conjunction. I don't want to make it a meta-addon regrouping every trick possible !

Send me links to Open Source research codes

The 4 external software interfaced with BakeMyScan are great, and they all come from motivated research groups. And that's where their strength come from.

If you have any idea about powerful Open Source codes which happen to accept command line parameters, and work on data that is exportable from blender, please let me know.

Integrating them into BakeMyScan is probably very easy to me, and is also an easy way to create a nice UI to them and make them available to the blender community.

I am mostly thinking about remeshing tools, UV unwrappers, surface reconstruction, image processing... Have a look at this issue on github to see the ones I have in mind at the moment!

I am currently setting up and getting familiar with an environment for me to work comfortably and provide users with as many information as possible:

* Blender Artists thread to share, discuss, critic, report... Reading this thread is, at the moment, the best way to get a good understanding of my project.

* bakemyscan.org will be the central resource with documentation, tutorials, "development blog"... But I still have lots of work to do on it !

* The source code is hosted on this github repository, where I work with issues and releases.

* I will dedicate a full something, somewhere, to a mid-term / long-term roadmap (Trello board, github project, a page on the website... I am doing the maths!) 

* I'll tweet updates and anouncements from my new twitter account

* I'll try to frequently upload ~10min videos showcasing common operations on real models (user-submitted probably), as well as ~2min "featurettes", on my (new as well) youtube channel.