To be fair, I live under a rock c: nothing but coding and coffee for this guy.
But rich guys screwing with each other is nothing new, right? If so, things haven’t changed much since I last saw the surface.
And now I shall go back to my cave. Cheers!
It would help to fund FOSS graphics drivers development to diffuse a better support of OpenGL in Linux world.
IMO, it is what is far behind into that ecosystem.
Although their machine gets old, people may want to release money into games before buying a new machine.
Hopefully this means a lot of known weak points in 2.8 being addressed for 2.81, and then there’s the hope we can get Stefen’s adaptive sampling patch and Lukas’ UDIM patch in as well 
It’s sad that even after you explain everything, some users can’t seem to see the benefits and instead start a rumor about some nefarious intent from Epic as a whole. Would they rather want far less Blender development if it means they can feel good, it’s all about feelings isn’t it?
“Eevee is a new physically based real-time renderer.” (https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-80/) 
But I know what you mean. Blender communication should be a bit more precise in what is meant with “real-time”.
This is great news for Blender. They’ll always be a lot of “I wants” but I trust Ton and the Blender team to spend the money wisely. @brecht put it succinctly.
It’s good to see resources assigned to project management, documentation, and similar tasks. While it’s in vogue to label them as evil, corporate, etc. these are still important and usually spell the difference between success and failure in the long run. Even more so the larger the project gets.
Congrats to Blender for this sponsor.
IMHO since Blender code base it always time consuming to have one’s head around, i will suggest to Ton to send emails to the old Blenderheads, people like @Psy-Fi, @KWD, Lukas, Lukas, Luke, Nicholas Bishop, and many other GSOC students. It seems like animation is getting orphan? @Aligorith has been silent for sometime already, what about animation 2020? @angavrilov has been around for so long now, may be never been hired by the foundation(No so sure with this statement). The idea should be no orphan module anymore, at least for sometime.
Calling people socialist just like that is pretty much a juvenile attitude since i am not a socialist.
But hey believe what you like to believe but no one can read his mind and he can also be doing it because he like to do it just like how Ton like to do stuff like he frequently say!
If i had ton of money i would like to make it a dynamic element that start many projects and i would enjoy seeing it evolve.
Believing that every single successful person on this planet is purely making nice thing because they only want more money is ridiculous.
It wouldn’t cost billions, but it’d still be a tremendous amount of money.
Why not split the difference, and make a short interactive realtime demo? BI doesn’t have to make a full game to illustrate Blender’s capabilities. All it takes is a single snazzy scene with lots of buzz and pretty effects to draw some attention, like what Unity did with Book of the Dead.
I never said you were
At the risk of sounding utopic, could a grant to Pablo Dobarro and his sculpt mode overhaul count as “code quality improvement”? I have a lot of hope on the new tools and other tweaks he’s doing;
Yes in thread that was flag 
I hope you understand i am just teasing you! 
I don’t think so.
But still, I think BF should hire him full time, no matter what. He seems to be a talented developer and not afraid of challenges, which is great and very rare these days. 
I wouldn’t be surprised if we found out they were drawing up a contract for him as we speak. They’re hiring at least 4 new developers now, aren’t they?
this makes me happy
According to the interview with Ton on today’s Blender Today, it sounds like he will be hired along with some other developers.
Surprised haven’t seen a link posted (I don’t know how to do it myself). Lots of interesting details/explanation about the Epic grant and other things.
Seems like another huge grant is on its way as well, and an rtx support announcement in two weeks by…someone.
Apologies in advance if I misinterpreted what I heard while watching the video. Either way, interesting times ahead.
Edited to add: in the interest of getting more people to watch the Blender Today video so they can discuss and explain things said which I don’t understand, Ton also discussed the animation 2020 project, mac os/metal/vulkan support, what features might be in the next release, and other stuff…
I think this is the same video:
Blender Today Live #70 - With Ton Roosendaal
what i got from the video
Sybren is no more a cloud dev but a blender dev and he’s working on Usd support,
In siggraph we will see something about the Rtx support
more on blender physics in 2 weeks or more
another big grant but nothing official of curse
Maybe Pablo is interested to join the dev, maybe more on that in the next blender today episode
Clements faucault is looking into Vulkan already
etc…
It’s Epic dumping a ton of money on the Blender Foundation, with the only stipulation being that it has to be put exclusively towards Blender’s development. Considering the money is explicitly stated to be a grant, Epic has no control over what it’s used for beyond the initial agreement, and thus doesn’t have any legal standing that would allow them to step in and do something sneaky that may work against the Blender community in the future.
There are literally no downsides to any of this. The only way things could go south is if Ton pops up on a Blender Today video, says that he thought that the Blender Foundation needed a new mascot, so they bought a used McLaren Speedtail for $1.1 million, and got Pablo Dobarro to paint a smiley face on the hood, and the Blender logo on the doors.
…and I could forgive that.
Now all those parents frantically eating nails while looking at their kids playing Fortnite on and on know were their money ends… 
Yes. If you listened to the Blender Today Live episode it sounds like Ton has been thinking about ways to improve the development process and make things more professional for some time. When he wrote the proposal for Epic, he made it around the idea of making better development processes.
When Epic accepted the proposal and gave them the grant, it was not predicated on doing anything that Ton had in the proposal, so while he says he intends to use the money in that way, there is actually no limitation at all from Epic as to what they can do with the money, as long as it’s improving Blender in some way and not skiing holidays or McLaren mascots