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 Blender Foundation promised to create a new game engine after removing the old bge.
Godot may be a nice game engine with lots of features, but when it comes to speed of development and workflow nothing can beat the bge since you literally just need to press "p" to test your game and "Tab" to make an adjustment to your models, all in one application.
I really loved the BGMCs (Blender Game Making Contests) where lots of cool games were developed.
Its a pity that the bge was removed before having a replacement. This will likely destroy the lively community around it since everyone will have moved on until it gets added. A new game engine isn't written overnight.
BrazilianGamer Jul 24, 2019
Just imagine saving your company in millions of dollars in licenses? It so easy to jump into the "Open Software wagon" once this software has the quality of a paid software, so what Epic and Ubisoft did wasnt some altruism towards "Open Software" is a way to save them millions of dollars in buying licenses, hiring developers and research technologies.
Wonder how for Tim Scammey Open Software is something cool but Open OSes arent that cool.
1)epic is not doing it for their own games only, they arent looking at the money that they will save in licences, but the money that the developers who publish games and assets on epic store will save, the cheaper it is for then with an better software the best the games and assets will be on it, so epic is not trying to save money on software licences at all.
yet, this move will help valve and other stores as well, so the only competitive advantage it will make for then is good publicity.
2)the ubisoft who is investing on blender is the animation sub dividsion, afaik you can watch an animation on linux.
3)is not about caring or not about open OSes they do care about Android for example, the issue is, its economically imviable to invest money on linux for most companies, ideology dont pay bills no company will bankrupt then selves to help linux and evne if epic and valve did it, it could be in vain, microsoft monopoly inst easy to break, even google wich has much more money cant break into it with chromeOS yet.
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