Joining many other companies that seemingly woke up to actually supporting free and open source software, Unity has now pledged funding towards Blender.
Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline.
Unity has joined them as a Corporate Patron which means they join the likes of AMD, NVIDIA and Epic Games in providing at least €120k a year in funding. This has helped to push the monthly amount that the Blender Foundation receives to over €100K per month (more here). Blender say this will allow 20 developers to work on the application full-time, which is good news for the industry as a whole.
“Ten years ago Unity already offered support for Blender files to Unity users” said Blender Foundation founder and chairman Ton Roosendaal. “Thanks to the grant we will continue investing in Blender core development, with particular focus on high quality interoperability with free and open formats.”
“At Unity we believe the world is a better place with more creators in it. This has always been at the core of our business. As such, our values align with those of the Blender Foundation and it seems a natural fit to continue our support of an open ecosystem that enables millions of users to create 3D content with a free tool,” said Dave Rhodes, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Unity Create Solutions, Unity Technologies.
Really good news, ensuring this vital open source software that supports Linux well can continue improving. From creating games to films, Blender is a very versatile tool.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
gradyvuckovic Aug 24, 2020
Ubisoft and Tangent Labs came good on open sourcing some of the plugins for Blender they've been working on internally. Ubisoft open sourced an addon for multiple users to collaborate on a Blender scene together, Tangent Labs just open sourced a plugin to make Blender's Cycles rendering engine compatible with Hydra, and showed a demo of the Cycles rendering engine working in Houdini's viewport.
Now with this milestone reached, Blender Foundation Dev Fund is up to $121,931 USD/month and soon will have 20 full time developers working on it. Which means it's only going to improve even faster than before.
The industry is waking up and realising how much they have to gain from supporting Blender. It's going to put Autodesk and other commercial players in the industry on their toes and force them to cut prices while ramping up their development efforts just to keep up with Blender.
This is a great example of open source simply working for everyone.
Well, everyone except Autodesk.
Last edited by gradyvuckovic on 24 August 2020 at 12:07 pm UTC
gradyvuckovic Aug 24, 2020
Great news! But let's hope there's some room in those 120k to work on bugfixes and stabilizing existing features. Also some of those needed performance improvements for sculpt mode and undo!
That's actually mostly what the Blender devs have been doing for the past couple of months.
I watch the developer.blender.org and code.blender.org sites pretty closely, watch what features they're working on, read each developer's weekly report of what they've been doing, and I can report that 2.90 has a stack of bug fixes in it, undo received a big performance boost in 2.83 and is going to have a few more improvements 2.90, and sculpt mode has a number of improvements as well. Animation playback in 2.90 has also had a few performance optimisations too, and a few UI optimisations, such as the redrawing of the outliner.
So more or less exactly everything you listed will be in 2.90, which will be out in a few days.
Some more improvements related to what you've mentioned are already in the master for Blender but won't be pushed out until Blender 2.91 (November), so it's only a matter of time until they arrive.
Good times ahead.
Personally I'm hoping they'll have some time to look at baking and texture painting, those are the areas I'd love to see some attention.
Last edited by gradyvuckovic on 24 August 2020 at 2:06 pm UTC
Great news! But let's hope there's some room in those 120k to work on bugfixes and stabilizing existing features. Also some of those needed performance improvements for sculpt mode and undo!
You can follow Pablo Dobarro on Twitter to get bits about sculpt mode improvements, as he's working full-time on it.
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