The Blender Foundation has announced it has been awarded a $1.2 million MegaGrant from Epic Games to “further the success of Blender”.
The grant will be spread over the next three years contributing to the Blender’s Professionalizing Blender Development Initiative that aims to improve the way the team works with better coordination and the implementation of practices to improve the quality of the code.
According to Blender Foundation founder and chairman Ton Roosendaal. “Thanks to the grant we will make a significant investment in our project organization to improve on-boarding, coordination and best practices for code quality. As a result, we expect more contributors from the industry to join our projects.”
Read the full press release on the Blender Foundation website.
Awesome!…Nice move Epic!
Very generous of Epic!
Autodesk ex CEO is at EPIC…
so he might have bought XSI to kill it and now he might be the one helping Blender.
All this is pure speculation of course, but if yes then why ?
I’m not aware that any AD’s ex CEO is at Epic. Which one ? Carl Bass ? Carol Bartz ?
Mark Petit, Ken Pimentel and a handful of more ex 3ds Maxers are at Epic now, yes, but surely not one of the ex CEO’s
Sorry Marc Petit wasn’t CEO but head of Autodesk’s Media & Entertainment division when they bought Softimage.
Ton Rosendaal spoke about him in the last Blender Today at the 12mn mark : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQZ9fXpXdtI
So yes he is now the general manager of the Games division at Epic and probably responsible for the grant.
Look it is great news but I find this puzzling.
This goes against Autodesk’s interests…
And what’s the problem? 🙂
Does EPIC has to go on favour of Autodesk for some reason?
Marc Petit was out of Autodesk just before the “ALL RENTAL” frenzy, I suspect he was againts that move on favour of users, he was a VP for M&E, in the same way Ken Pimentel was a pretty good PM for Max (his Xcalibur initiative was great on the medium term, Max has Nitrous thanks to him, the initiative was killed as soon as he was out of Adesk)
This kind of move is not anecdotal.
They’re probably just admitting that Open Source has won and that they’re investing for their own interest.
Of course, they aren’t giving out of pure altruism and charity. I’m sure they are giving to Blender for several reasons but one might be that they recognise a lot of young people entering the world of content creation are turning to Blender. Like Unity, they want to broaden their demographic, and Blender is compatible with that ‘democratization’ model. Its also great PR.
Marc Petit left Autodesk in 2013, long before the subscription model was introduced.
now they may use that money to make Blender a professional DCC
Yes, a very big baby-step for Blender.org!
This is simply Epic injecting some cash in the indie dev industry in the long run it may benefit them as many indies use or are switching over to blender, this means less upfront cost for making games.
Also I can’t help but feel Epic likes to F*ck around established big boys, I wouldn’t be surprised if some guy behind the curtain is rubbing his palms and hoping to cause some ripples in the ever still lake of Autodesk monopoly.
Ubisoft joins in.
https://news.ubisoft.com/en-us/article/353364/ubisoft-joins-blender-development-fund-to-support-open-source-animation