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.
Read the full announcement on blender.org.
Nice! Not just joining the dev fund but also sounds like they’ll be having in-house devs to push stuff back upstream. Blender’s taking over 
Well, it’s just their animation studio right now. But still neat that they’re switching. Oh and the funds and patches won’t hurt either 
Ok that’s great. I’m not sure how much ‘corporate gold’ is (fund.blender.org doesn’t seem to mention it exactly) but it’s fantastic news anyway.
Oh thanks. Didn’t even see that ribbon menu thing at the top. Ok so… I guess that represents one seasoned developer half-time, at 2500e per month ? Something like that ?
I can’t reach https://news.ubisoft.com/en-us/article/353364/ubisoft-joins-blender-development-fund-to-support-open-source-animation - it leads to /notfound. Did we bully their servers? 
At this rate, the BF may not have enough room in their new headquarters for everyone they can hire.
Now where in Amsterdam would the skyscraper go?
Wow amazing Ubisoft it’s hugeeeee company and for me the most important is that they will use blender for one of the studios that have ,fund it’s also welcome
This is getting serious. Look they really want to ditch Autodesk…
I believe in the beginning they will use only for TV shows and animation movies but in the long run they will shift to video games also and this will be game changer
the ubisoft link is not working right ?
Ubisoft is pushing an initiative for community created content for Beyond Good and Evil 2, so I can see them wanting to have tools available to do that that don’t cost thousands of dollars a year. I don’t really like a lot of their business tactics but helping Blender move further into the commercial space is a great thing.
Correct, I heard they’re making some edits so the article should be back.
Amazing news! This is just a sign of greater opportunities to come for this community.
I guess so. Mind that quad, Maya!
Here we go
Ubisoft Animation Studio (UAS), dedicated to creating animated, digital, and unscripted series for broadcast and digital distribution, will soon adopt the open-source animation software Blender as its main digital content creation (DCC) tool. Additionally, Ubisoft will support its development by joining the Blender Development Fund as a Corporate Gold Member. To learn more about recent changes at UAS and why Ubisoft sometimes uses open-source software, we spoke with Pierrot Jacquet, Head of Production at UAS.
Let’s start with some background on Ubisoft Animation Studio. What is the group’s mission, and how has its structure evolved since its creation?
Pierrot Jacquet: Ubisoft Animation Studio was created in 2011 as part of Ubisoft Film and Television to support the creation of the Rabbids Invasion TV series. We’ve since established our own studio based in Paris, Ubisoft Animation Studio, which oversees animated, digital, and unscripted content.
Our ambition is to build an independent production company with a distinctive voice inspired by Ubisoft’s worlds. Players expect Ubisoft to deliver AAA games, and to live up to that, we have to deliver AAA series, whether they are broadcast on TV or digitally. To best accomplish our goal, we decided to rebuild the foundations of the studio to emphasize creativity.
With this in mind, we created an incubator department to help bring new projects to life by giving creative and technological support to our directors and artists. It is a department with a very agile mindset that has the mission to explore new visual styles and creation tools that could help push the boundaries in animation.
How does shifting toward open source software support creativity within UAS?
PJ: Part of putting animation first is implementing technological solutions to support the creators. We decided to move from a workflow centered on in-house software to a more agile development environment supported by open source and inner source solutions. This way, our research and development and pipeline teams could focus their energy on bringing innovative ideas to the table, while working closely with the creatives.
In that new workflow, Blender is replacing our in-house digital content creation tool. We will use it to produce short content with the incubator at first and start to use it on our upcoming shows in 2020.
What about Blender makes it the right tool for the job in this new studio configuration?
PJ: Blender was, for us, an obvious choice considering our big move: it is supported by a strong and engaged community, and is paired up with the vision carried by the Blender Foundation, making it one of the most rapidly evolving DCCs on the market.
On top of that, this is an open source project. It allows us to contribute to its development both by joining as a Corporate Member, and by sharing with the community some of the tools our dedicated Blender team will be developing. We love the idea that this mutual exchange between the foundation, the community, and our studio will benefit everyone in the end.
For those that may not know, Blender has been around for quite some time as open-source animation software. Why has Ubisoft chosen now to become a Corporate Gold Member?
PJ: We believe that Blender 2.8, which will be released in the coming days, is a game-changer for the CGI industry. Blender has been on Ubisoft’s radar for a long time already, and in the past year, more and more of our artists have shown an interest in using it in production. The growth of our internal Blender community, as well as the innovations brought by 2.8 – e.g. a revamped UX, Grease Pencil, EEVEE real-time rendering – convinced us that this was the right time to bring support to our artists and productions that would like to add Blender to their toolkit. What better way to support that switch than donating to the Blender Foundation, so we can help Blender to continue to grow?
How does working with open-source tools balance out with in-house developed tools?
PJ: At Ubisoft Animation Studio, we will always have very specific needs, and in-house development is the most efficient way to serve these.
On the other hand, when we had our own DCC, we had to spend a significant amount of time to maintain and improve the core of the software; this was time we couldn’t spend innovating. Working with open source solutions like Blender offers us more flexibility and frees some resources to focus on research and exploration of new ways and tools to create animated shows.
Our discussions with the Blender Foundation have shown us that our goals are aligned, making the open source collaboration the obvious choice.
How do you see Ubisoft expanding its support of open-source software in the future?
PJ: Up to now, Ubisoft tested the waters by open sourcing some in-house projects (such as Sharpmake), and forking existing open-source projects (such as Massgate). We consider open source the best possible software development models available to us, and we are ready not only to invest but also to contribute to mature open-source software such as Blender, which is evolving rapidly at the speed of our industry.