Two surprising bits of news recently about Blender, the free and open source 3D creation suite as they've managed to secure some extra funding from two big names.
Firstly, it was announced on July 15th that Epic Games awarded them $1.2 million from Epic's MegaGrants program. Quite an impressive number and good to see a company such as Epic support open source software in such a way. They don't get it all at once though, it will trickle in over the next three years, to help with Blender's "Professionalizing Blender Development Initiative".
"Open tools, libraries and platforms are critical to the future of the digital content ecosystem," said Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games. "Blender is an enduring resource within the artistic community, and we aim to ensure its advancement to the benefit of all creators."
Additionally and also quite a surprise, is that Ubisoft have also joined in which was announced only today. Ubisoft has now become a "corporate Gold member" of the "Blender Foundation’s Development Fund" which will further help support Blender developers. On top of that, Ubisoft Animation Studio will be moving over to primarily using Blender as its main digital content creation tool and have developers contribute too. If you want to know more about all that, there's an interview on Ubisoft's website.
"Good news keeps coming" says Blender founder and chairman Ton Roosendaal, "it’s such a miracle to witness the industry jumping on board with us! I’ve always admired Ubisoft, as one of the leading games and media producers in the world. I look forward to work with them and help them finding their ways as a contributor to our open source projects on blender.org."
This is fantastic. Having open source software like this, that runs on Linux and is properly funded will only strengthen their position to providing awesome tools for everyone for free.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
The recent UI changes are impressive, and even more so because it is not often that open source projects manage to do overhauls of any of their big systems, like the entire UI.
I personally use Blender as my video editing tool.
Usually, Big Bucks Companies stick to each other.
Perkeleen_Vittupää Jul 22, 2019
Quoting: SmilexEveryone behind what is Blender today put in an immense effort to get this far. It's such an impressive project.
The recent UI changes are impressive, and even more so because it is not often that open source projects manage to do overhauls of any of their big systems, like the entire UI.
I personally use Blender as my video editing tool.
How in practice does Blender compare with say, OpenShot, Kdenlive or Lightworks in the day to day simple video editing?
Should anyone interested give it a go as a daily driver you think?
Quoting: Alm888I wonder, what Autodesk® had done to piss these guys off so much that they openly started undermining its dominance by supporting the direct competitor?
Usually, Big Bucks Companies stick to each other.
The only problem with Maya and 3DSMAX is their price. For indies/hobbyist Blender is the way to go and I think that Unity and Epic wants to reduce newcomers costs.
Kimyrielle Jul 22, 2019
Sir_Diealot Jul 22, 2019
Quoting: Perkeleen_VittupääQuoting: SmilexEveryone behind what is Blender today put in an immense effort to get this far. It's such an impressive project.
The recent UI changes are impressive, and even more so because it is not often that open source projects manage to do overhauls of any of their big systems, like the entire UI.
I personally use Blender as my video editing tool.
How in practice does Blender compare with say, OpenShot, Kdenlive or Lightworks in the day to day simple video editing?
Should anyone interested give it a go as a daily driver you think?
Last I checked (at least half a year ago) it was existent but not great. Well, better than OpenShot, which is a very low hurdle that is overcome by working at all.
The UI takes some getting used to, maybe less if you are already familiar with Blender.
Editing seemed rather powerful due to what's already there. Exporting was single threaded only and took ages, unless you used some ugly hacks which likely break stuff (let multiple Blender instances render parts of the video and stitch it together using ffmpeg).
I have no experience with Lightworks.
KDEnlive is the best I found on Linux so far. Unfortunately it pulls in most of the KDE desktop.
EDIT: Pretty sure it was 2.70, 2.80 comes with a preset video editing view that looks nice and usable off the bat. Haven't tried it yet though.
Last edited by Sir_Diealot on 22 July 2019 at 7:05 pm UTC
Quoting: x_wingQuoting: Alm888I wonder, what Autodesk® had done to piss these guys off so much that they openly started undermining its dominance by supporting the direct competitor?
Usually, Big Bucks Companies stick to each other.
The only problem with Maya and 3DSMAX is their price. For indies/hobbyist Blender is the way to go and I think that Unity and Epic wants to reduce newcomers costs.
It's also that you can contribute to an open source project and steer the direction of development while you are at Autodesk:s mercy when it comes to how Maya will evolve. Epic probably also noticed that the vast majority of the game publishers on their store already uses Blender so by supporting it they are also proving support for their store partners.
Last edited by Beamboom on 22 July 2019 at 8:05 pm UTC
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