Ubisoft joins Blender Development Fund
polycounter lvl 9
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!
Replies
Hope there is more comming in the Future.
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/
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?
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
Blender 2.80-release-candidate is about 300MB.
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).
...bugger