Ubisoft joins Blender Development Fund

Blond

Today Ubisoft announced that they will join the Blender Foundation’s Development Fund as a corporate Gold member. Not only will Ubisoft help funding online support for Blender developers, Ubisoft Animation Studio – a department of Ubisoft Film and Television – will also use Blender for their productions and assign developers to contribute to Blender’s open source projects.

https://www.blender.org/press/ubisoft-joins-blender-development-fund/?fbclid=IwAR3tsva9SBRlALf6FndELMLIktVPGXo7rwHYylsMRA7aTMoU1ZxtuNs2cG8


2.80 is almost close to release and after multiple kept promises, beta testing and a freakton of new features, this recent news is just great to hear! I already heard from some friend working at Ubi that quite a few people over there were already using Blender for heavy modeling work!:
Woot! 

It's time to convert people! No more complaining about being tied to Autodesk now!

oglu

For now its only the Animation Studio that is doing the Raving Rabbids. Its not the whole company.
Hope there is more comming in the Future. 

Aabel

Considering how deeply corporate giants have embraced Linux and fund it's development, I have wondered why Blender hasn't seen a  similar level of support. Hopefully this means the tide is turning.

oraeles77

im out of the loop, is it good or bad?

Aabel

I'ts a very good thing.

littleclaude

Front-page news.

Also Epic Games are helping out with a donation of 1.2 million

https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-foundation-with-1-2-million-epic-megagrant/

rollin

And, now you know how much it's worth to break the Autodesk monpoly.

VelvetElvis

It is 1.2 million over 3 years. So it is not a one lump sum they can use all at once. So not great, but not bad either.

What is the cost of time and money for a studio like Ubisoft to 100% convert over to Blender? Say, for example, Ubisoft took 4 weeks where every studio in their umbrella was 100% idled and only doing tasks related to converting over to Blender and for training for their entire staff.

That is the true cost to break the Autodesk grip.

Yet keep in mind that the more corporate support Blender gets the more like Autodesk they will become. Max and Maya were not always stuck in the circle of development hell where they add features no one wants and break features that have worked for many versions in the past. They were once really good tools that were developed with users and not shareholders in mind. Has everyone also forgot when the world shit itself when Substance was purchased by Adobe?

rollin

I don't think anyone will (or should) switch software mid production but as part of the pre-production it makes sense and doesn't "cost" that much. It will gradually fade in imo.

On the other hand I think comparing Substance with Blender is not that easy. You're right about becoming-bigger can definitely change something. But I'm working with OpenOffice/ LibreOffice now for years and Microsoft hasn't "done" anything that would change it for me. Blender is also there for quite some time and i'm not sure if it's that easy to buy them. They might have tried already. 

And finally: The only corporate "support" I ever witnessed from Autodesk was "Do you want to buy the newest version which is sooo great?".
But that's just from my point of view. Nor that I ever needed their support (except from, you know, making the software work in the first place). I'm just sticking with these >8 year old version(s) that 'just' work and fix the rest with my own tools and stuff from other developers. 
Obviously this depends on what you're doing.

So whatever happens.. most likely it wont be boring

SnowInChina

VelvetElvis said:

It is 1.2 million over 3 years. So it is not a one lump sum they can use all at once. So not great, but not bad either.

What is the cost of time and money for a studio like Ubisoft to 100% convert over to Blender? Say, for example, Ubisoft took 4 weeks where every studio in their umbrella was 100% idled and only doing tasks related to converting over to Blender and for training for their entire staff.

getting funding is great

getting 400k a year is really great, thats like half the budget they have now, extra

also, whats great about blender, you don't really need to switch, you can have it as a second modeling program at no cost

i am exited about the news, maybe we can get some extra juicy tools out of it *cough*rewrite the uv unwrap*cough*

RN

oraeles77 said:

im out of the loop, is it good or bad?

Ubisoft, Epic etc. are investing in Blender and are going to go after their own interests. I think it's too soon to tell if these news are good for the average Blender user. It depends on the kind of changes that the studios will want.

The two most popular 3D packages (Max and Maya) happen to be huge heavy beasts, with GBs of size.
Blender 2.80-release-candidate is about 300MB.

rollin

Most likely these "beasts" come with asset libraries of some kind. I heavily doubt the code doing the actual work is GBs in size...

xrg

Epic and Valve (Steam Workshop) are pretty hands off. FWIW, Ton applied for the Epic MegaGrant. Epic didn't just show up in Amsterdam with a giant check randomly.

Ubisoft and Tangent contribute funding and also have in-house devs develop things they need and push some back upstream. Cryptomatte came from Tangent for example. It's similar to how Linux is developed. Hardware vendors submit patches to Linux so it runs on their hardware. Everyone is working out of their own self-interest but collectively winds up making the software better for everyone.

RyanB

SnowInChina said:

also, whats great about blender, you don't really need to switch, you can have it as a second modeling program at no cost

This is exactly what I do.  For example, I did a Voronoi fracture in Blender and export it to Maya for a simulation. 

Even bigger than the extra money is the change to left-click by default in Blender 2.8.  Tons of people have opened up Blender just to be frustrated by it's UI.  Yes, I know...I know...you can change it.  But, 95% of the artists out there are not technical and want something that is familiar when they start using new software.

SnowInChina

i never understood why they thought it would be a good idea to make right click select the default setting

Hayden_Price

SnowInChina said:

i never understood why they thought it would be a good idea to make right click select the default setting

In 2.8 the default is left click. That's why they're getting millions of dollars now. 

RN

rollin said:

Most likely these "beasts" come with asset libraries of some kind. I heavily doubt the code doing the actual work is GBs in size...

I can only speak from my own experience. Maya feels sluggish, each operation is a bit like walking on a tightrope. It crashed often, the undoes sometimes didn't completely restore the scene etc. -- if you'd ask me what word to describe the program, it would be "beast". 
Blender 2.79 is one of the most stable programs I've ever used (though I feel the viewport performance in 2.80 has been reduced, now that it's using complex shaders instead of the simple "fixed function" shading of 2.79).

xrg said:

Everyone is working out of their own self-interest but collectively winds up making the software better for everyone.

If Ubisoft develops things that they need, then that is not acting out of their own self-interest. But I get what you're saying, they "add functionality that will also be useful to unrelated people" so everyone benefits. I hope you're right.

I didn't know about the Epic grant being requested by the Blender Foundation themselves, that is useful information.

sacboi

Even bigger than the extra money is the change to left-click by default in Blender 2.8.

...bugger  

xrg

  

RN said:

I didn't know about the Epic grant being requested by the Blender Foundation themselves, that is useful information.

Ton made a blog post that has some details about the Epic Grant. He posted it only 5 days ago and it's already slightly out of date. Ubisoft and two anime studios signed up since then, plus they hired Pablo Dobarro to work on sculpt/paint stuff. Then there is Siggraph next week, which may have some more announcements.

A lot of excitement in Blender-land lately.