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Ubisoft joins Blender Development Fund to support open-source animation
- MichaelHoste 7y agoThe link seems to redirect to https://news.ubisoft.com/notfound https://news.ubisoft.com/notfound without any visible content. Here is the press release from Blender: https://www.blender.org/press/ubisoft-joins-blender-development-fund/ https://www.blender.org/press/ubisoft-joins-blender-developm...
- ihuman 7y agoIt seems the Ubisoft news website is a bit buggy, or theres an issue with its cached pages. If you go to the main news page[0], its not there. However, if you click "Latest", it brings to to the same URL, but with the Blender article on top. Clicking that still brings you to the notfound page you linked. Edit: It's now there on the news home page without having to click "Latest", but it still 404's. https://news.ubisoft.com/en-us/home https://news.ubisoft.com/en-us/home
- noname120 7y agohttps://archive.is/E40G1 https://archive.is/E40G1
- kragniz 7y agoLink seems to have broken, see also https://www.blender.org/press/ubisoft-joins-blender-development-fund/ https://www.blender.org/press/ubisoft-joins-blender-developm...
- bluedino 7y agoWhile this is 'good' for the users of the software, isn't it 'bad' for the software industry? Community funded projects will never match the salaries that companies like AutoDesk pay their developers.
- pixelbath 7y agoIt's not a zero-sum game; multiple software that performs the same function can co-exist, and should co-exist. If Autodesk is feeling a pinch on their bottom line because of a free software product, the burden is on them to make a better product; they've certainly had the runway to do so in the past 30 years of building products and acquiring other similar products.
- gmueckl 7y agoThe market is weird and it's currently a zero sum game at best. DCC tools are in this weird little market that has extremely few paying (and mostly cash-strapped) customers, but the software itself is ridiculously complex. IIRC, Maya was estimated at ~5 mio. lines of code when version 1 or 2 was released, and it has gotten much, much more complex since. My understanding is that not all companies selling these programs are in the market for profit. If that goes away, it's likely that everybody loses.
- logicchains 7y agoA community funded project could end up with someone like Linus Torvalds or Fabrice Bellard working on it, whereas a company like AutoDesk wouldn't pay enough to hire someone of that calibre.
- bluedino 7y agoDon't those people work on things because they want to and not because the community pays them? There are plenty of high-caliber developers working on commercial products
- Ralfp 7y agoTon Roosendaal (Blender creator) estimated in 2018 interview that 3D software market is very small, and pulled up Autodesk's (3DsMax/Maya, etc) business results from that time, which amounted to 25000 - 30000 yearly licenses. He also claimed that Maya has "maybe 20" developers behind with things being similar for other products. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg (jump to 1h mark)
- jsgo 7y agoMaybe this new UI change to Blender means it is high time I learn how to use it. Tried it before but couldn't get past left click not doing what I expect left clicking to do, but apparently things are more user friendly now. The influx of money/talent from Epic and Ubisoft is great though. Blender was, from what I've seen from the outside, looked on affectionately as being a good tool, but maybe this leads to them being a consideration for primary tool (beyond just free) in the way the commercial tools have been.
- anchpop 7y agoThe UI is definitely much nicer now, and the release candidates are very stable. If you'd like to learn, I'd definitely recommend sticking to 2.80 tutorials and not trying to understand 2.79 tutorials. This series [0] is a decent starting point. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF1qEhBSfq4&list=PLa1F2ddGya_-UvuAqHAksYnB0qL9yWDO6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF1qEhBSfq4&list=PLa1F2ddGya...
- Tade0 7y agoTried it before but couldn't get past left click not doing what I expect left clicking to do, Same here, but while that turned out to be a hoop I could go through eventually, the seemingly random API changes from version to version and associated backwards incompatibility of user scripts were not.
- slezyr 7y ago> Tried it before but couldn't get past left click not doing what I expect left clicking to do, but apparently things are more user friendly now. Do not expect to master it by just clicking around. It's more like CAD you can do nothing without book/tutorials.
- Washuu 7y agoPerhaps for Blender 2.7. With 2.8 I am able to accidentally/organically discover functionality that I was looking for. Tooltips are also vastly improved so that if I am unsure how to use a tool if gives at minimum the things I need to look it up.
- noname120 7y agoThis happens just 7 days after Epic Games contributed with $1.2m[1]. The future looks bright for Blender. If more companies follow, it might finally have enough funding to give it the development resources that it deserves. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20442131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20442131
- RenRav 7y agoBlender was always somewhat looked down upon, from my own experience seeking resources online. Hopefully this changes people's opinions.
- haxiomic 7y agoI'm playing with 2.8 today and it's totally changed my opinion. In about 1 hour it's gone from, "Blenders that weird tool that I can never figure out" to "I'd prefer to use Blender over the Autodesk tools I'm more familiar with" I'm really impressed by the quality of the UI design in the update
- RenRav 7y agoWow, you're right. It looks so much better.
- xvilka 7y agoHopefully, Krita[1], GIMP[2], and Inkscape[3] will get a similar amount of support. [1] https://krita.org/en/support-us/donations/ https://krita.org/en/support-us/donations/ [2] https://www.gimp.org/donating/ https://www.gimp.org/donating/ [3] https://inkscape.org/support-us/donate/ https://inkscape.org/support-us/donate/
- chronogram 7y agoI love those drawn looking animation videos for games like The Burdens of Shaohao https://g.co/kgs/419Tq1 https://g.co/kgs/419Tq1 but are there any video game examples where those tools would be beneficial? My video game knowledge is not wide enough. Blender I can definitely see.
- Qwertystop 7y agoYes? 2D art is useful in both 2D and 3D games (billboard sprites, UI, textures).
- codetrotter 7y agoIn addition to that, a lot of concept art is made with 2D drawing and painting software.
- babuskov 7y agoAny 2D game basically, and some assets for 3D games as well. For examples of 2D games with great graphics, take a look at: Mark of The Ninja, Hollow Knight, Limbo, Stardew Valley, Rayman Legends.
- WorldMaker 7y agoThe amount of hand-drawn animation that went into Cuphead is a marvel. There a bunch of really interesting examples just using Ubisoft's UbiArt framework such as Rayman Legends, Child of Light, and Valiant Hearts. Speaking of Ubisoft and open source, Ubisoft originally announced UbiArt as an engine/framework intended to be open sourced. It's a shame that Ubisoft never followed up on that promise. Supposedly it hasn't been used for a game since 2015 because it was "hard to use", but that seems more of a reason to open source it, perhaps to see if community interest could help where internal-only work struggled. A lot of open source starts hard to use and takes a village to make it better. (Blender, also mentioned here, might just be a poster child of that, too.)
- Aissen 7y agoIf I'm reading correctly, this means they'll pay about €30k / year (see https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/ https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/ ), and "assign developers to contribute to Blender's open source projects". The latter is probably higher value, but I'd have preferred if they'd already started before making the announcement. Otherwise this just feels like previous broken promises: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/125952/Ubisofts_Ancel_Planning_To_Open_Up_Rayman_Origins_Tech.php https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/125952/Ubisofts_Ancel_Pl...
- vernie 7y agoHey if it hurts Autodesk I'm for it.
- dgellow 7y agoWow, that's so great. This announcement, the one from Epic Games, and the release of v2.8. So many great news for Blender! That makes me really motivated to try out to create a project using it.
- Bekwnn 7y agoI feel like 2.8 preview is what made companies step forward to support it. It was a big step in making blender a more attractive alternative.
- noobermin 7y agoI'll go ahead and say the quiet part loud, if Blender can create a low cost alternative to Maya and the rest especially for entry and beginning level modelers and animators, this is a great thing.
- raphaelj 7y agoIsn't it already the case? Blender is somehow popular with indie developers.
- gmueckl 7y agoI'll counter as devil's advocate here and state that blender is only popular because it's the cheapest option, not because it's actually good. Commercial offerings are still ahead by a lot, especially in usability (the most important aspect for creative tools), but so is their price tag. And the indie developer is a pretty poor idealistic fellow without a production budget from which to afford luxuries like proper tools.
- shmerl 7y agoIt already did. More to the point, if Blender can create an easy to use and fully functional alternative to closed tools, it would be even better.
- BeefySwain 7y ago"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." This seams like a really big deal. It's one thing to try to create a desert of profitability around yourself, which a lot of huge companies giving money to tangential FOSS projects could be construed as. It is quite another to have them commit to use the software internally. Are there any other large multimedia companies that are known to primarily use FOSS media production programs?
- chriswwweb 7y agoYes it's a big deal, developers that submit code is probably worth more than the membership which is (only) €30K/year (if my research is correct: https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/ https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/), so those 30k will allow them to hire a dev halftime, as blender fund says that 30k are equivalent to "half year developer time". Well it depends how much those developers will actually contribute, but it's still very good news. But on the other hand they just got 1.2 million from Epic Games for 3 years ... to me this seems to be a much bigger contribution: https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-foundation-with-1-2-million-epic-megagrant/! https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-fo...?
- hellofunk 7y ago> For Corporate Patron (120k/year or more) membership please contact us directly. I suspect Epic obviously fell into that category.
- gmueckl 7y agoKudos to blender's marketing team. They get a bit of free money from this. But the true motive for Epic and Unisoft is likely an attempt to strong-arm Autodesk into providing better support and maintainance. Dissatisfaction with Autodesk lack of care for their DCC tools has been growing for a very long time now, but studios also have a huge investment into these tools as parts of their proprietary pipelines. Expect Autodesk to kowtow soon and make sure that none of these companies will make the switch. If it means that Autodesk actually delivers bugfixes for the version the customer has instead of one or two releases down the road, it is a good outcome for the studios.
- sangnoir 7y agoBlender is replacing an in-house tool, not software licensed from Autodesk. You might have missed the following section from the article "We decided to transform 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."
- knd775 7y agoThis still feels like a warning to Autodesk. They are replacing what they already can with Blender, and investing the money required to get it to where it needs to be in order to fit their other workflows.
- electricslpnsld 7y agoI don’t think Autodesk cares! Pixar bailed on Maya and Autodesk still put Maya on life support (and laid off the Maya R&D team). If arguably the biggest actor in the animation game doesn’t get Autodesk’s attention, why would Ubisoft?
- panpanna 7y agoDidn't Epic just made a similar announcement? Anyway, I wish more FOSS projects could copy blenders way of working. They start a very big and ambitious project then update the code to support it. For example Elephants Dream gave them character animation. Big Buck Bunny gave them hair rendering & animation. https://www.blender.org/about/projects/ https://www.blender.org/about/projects/
- laputan_machine 7y agoI believe this is also the same approach Mozilla have taken with Rust & Servo (although Servo is not quite as production-ready as I was expecting this long down the line, although re-reading the description, perhaps it was always meant to be a cute project, not a browser for the masses)
- mikepurvis 7y agoI think the history of Servo has been retconned a bit. See for example this fluff piece from late 2012, shortly after the project was publicly announced: https://www.geek.com/chips/new-firefox-rendering-engine-servo-was-purpose-built-for-multiple-cores-1531707/ https://www.geek.com/chips/new-firefox-rendering-engine-serv... "A new rendering engine for Firefox is being developed by Mozilla, and it’s being built from the ground up for multi-core computing environments. Mozilla has delivered some pretty major performance improvements to Firefox over the last few versions. The IonMonkey JavaScript engine is firing on all cylinders, and now it looks as though the Gecko engine may soon be replaced by something much more modern." If this wasn't Mozilla's intention from the beginning, they certainly didn't do much to temper this enthusiasm or clear up the misunderstanding.
- tosh 7y agorelated: “Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement” https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement
- rambo5 7y agoI love this. I wish more companies would contribute like this to open source tech that they use.
- newsreview1 7y agoWhat are your thoughts between Krita and Gimp? I know a lot of you love Gimp but I find it a bit dated
- TylerE 7y agoI don’t recall anyone ever loving gimp, at least beyond it’s GPLness. It’s been the butt (deservedly) of UI jokes for as long as I can remember.