The Blender team today are making quite the super-effective splash about the Blender 2.93 LTS release mentioning how it's been "20 years in the making".
Why the big splash then? What's going on? Well they say they're "paving the way for the next generation open source 3D creation pipeline". Not only is this a long-term support release, meaning it has at least a 2 year life-span of fixes so it can be used for big projects, they're also ramping up work officially on Blender 3.0. Back in April 2021, it also marked 10 years since the Cycles rendering engine was announced. Lots of big milestones have been hit for Blender lately. Some of their plans you can see in their previous roadmap.
Check out their release feature overview video below:
Direct Link
Blender is a hugely important free and open source project, one used from video games to movies it's a clear example of how FOSS can thrive.
See the full release announcement and the release notes for the full details.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
They're on $135K/month, funding 20 developers full time. I wish more FOSS projects got this kind of support, but it's great to see Blender go from strength to strength!
gradyvuckovic Jun 3, 2021
These performance improvements are really adding up for Cycles, and the geometry nodes are growing with each update, they're going to become a killer feature of Blender.
Blender is OP!
BeedrillSwarm Jun 3, 2021
ElectricPrism Jun 3, 2021
In a world with Adobe SaaS I could imagine many rich companies throwing some coin at the FOSS Sauce to save money in the future.
Quoting: ElectricPrismImagine we could do for GIMP what has been done for Blender, what an amazing thing that would be.Will never happen while it's called GIMP.
Doc Angelo Jun 3, 2021
Quoting: Ham_TaroWhy are those company funding Blender?
I guess because Blender is a fundamental element in game development, and more games developed means more business for these companies.
robertosf92 Jun 3, 2021
Quoting: Ham_TaroWhy are those company funding Blender?
My bet is that they think it can serve as an Autodesk (3ds Max, Maya) replacement, where for maybe less money (Most drop 30K a year) you can actually get to have a voice in the foundation, so for less money (probably) you get more gain.
Can this happen with GIMP? Not in quite some time, I think. Maybe Godot can slowly take some of Unity's market share, but I'm not sure.
Libreoffice is another one where you might see, if 1) DOCX support improves or 2)Institutoins around the world adopt ODF as the standard format. Less cost, more control over the final product you get, I think it's the best way it could go, tbh
Quoting: robertosf92Can this happen with GIMP? Not in quite some time, I think.
Don't think so either. For professional level 3D modellers/renderers there was a huge market gap. For a lot of supporting parties there is a clear benefit of having one sit in a place that was affordable to regular people and companies just starting out. This is not really the case for image manipulation where Adobe stepped in to serve that segment by itself.
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