And the way they intend to help is to become the development fund’s newest Patron.
In fact, the Animation 2020 outline was what caught the attention of their creative director in the first place, and now his division of the world’s largest company wants to help the BF get the resources they need to make it happen. For those who do any kind of rigging, this will be a welcome contribution.
Now before people start agonizing over yet another megacorp supporting Blender, keep in mind that there are so many sponsors now that every company has but a small piece of the pie, and this is before we factor in Ton’s steadfast refusal to let them make decisions about the roadmap (at least not without his permission).
This could mean an already large dev. team will get even larger, Blender is becoming a serious force now.
I use AWS to do all my animation rendering. I love to hear that they are doing this.
At the moment I use Barista to link Blender and AWS, but I would love to see in the future, a native AWS tab in Blender that automagically links your animations to a AWS server.
Can you imagine a high end GPU not really being a need in the future of 3D? Where everything GPU related is done in real-time on the cloud, similar to but not the same as Stadia.
Use whatever OS you want with no penalties for performance.
It’s more like Animation 2021 or 2022.
If Blender catches up to Maya’s level in tools & wide use in Studios then the whole entertainment industry will start making huge shifts to open source ,in this case Blender
Guys and Gals be realistic. Only Evil™ corporations have money to throw away. Also be aware that this Evil corporations such “donations” cut from taxes, and get free advertisement. So in the end this is all business. In case that this company do not have direct interest in CG, who care. Even if default cube get Amazon logo
As long as Ton is around I do not think the BF will even entertain that idea, as even in the last week he expressed concern about developers having to get code from commercial sites to build Blender (so the solution would be to host the libraries locally).
Ton is likely to remain alive for a couple of decades yet, so any notable change pertaining to Blender as free software may not occur until 2040 or later, this is assuming there is no earthshaking geopolitical change doing extremist things like abolishing commercial software, or even copyright.
Super stoked about this. I find it interesting that people have talked about voting for feature development with money before, and this is kind of like that. It’s like AWS saw Animation 2020 that they really want wasn’t happening so they decided to throw money at Blender to make it happen.
I would love to see a mega company decide to throw money at Blender specifically for major performance improvements, to make sculpting viewport experience similar to ZBrush handling similar or better polys, to make undo issues a thing of the past, make animation playback faster, implement some impressive real time physics papers, same with Cycles, Eevee, etc.
I’m not sure that is possible given that ZBrush doesn’t use OpenGL for its viewport and instead does some extremely optimized software rendering. Perhaps Vulkan can reach that performance given that it’s on a much lower level than OpenGL.
