The good news for the open source application Blender just keeps flowing, after Unity announced their support for funding Blender only recently, now Ubisoft will be continuing with their funding as they've renewed their relationship with Blender.
Reminder—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.
Originally announced last year around the same time Epic Games also joined in on funding Blender, it was announced August 24 that Ubisoft have renewed their funding at the corporate Gold member level. This is the same level as before, meaning Ubisoft will continue paying the Blender Foundation €30K a year.
Not only that, Ubisoft have been dipping their toes into more open source too. Ubisoft open sourced (GPL) their "Mixer" add-on for Blender, which was developed at Ubisoft Animation Studio for Real Time Collaboration, allowing multiple Blender users to work on the same scene at the same time. Thanks to a broadcasting server that is independent from Blender, it is also possible to implement a connection for other 3D editing software.
See more on the Blender website.
Especially the fact that they are designing the server portion of the system to allow for technically any application to be used in conjunction with any other application. Not only would it open the door to potentially wonderful collaborative real time experiences with other Blender users, but also users of other software, and maybe even a way of effectively editing a scene in two applications at the same time? And combine the functionality of both?
Lots potential, will watch what Ubisoft does with that addon with great interest.
It's also just nice to see Ubisoft getting in on the fun and making some open source goodness.
Now if only they could open source UPlay..
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