NVIDIA joins Blender Development Fund
TheMysteryIsThePoint
Posts: 3,232
in The Commons
At the Patron level. I can only wonder what is going to happen with, and now it's a possibility, with Blender, Epic, and Nvidia devs in the same meeting.
All that's missing is Daz and then I could die happy in my bed.
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Comments
Well for one, they will NOT be acquired by anyone. Blender is a foundation, not a company/business.
Now if only they made it as easy to use...
As I understand this, Nvidia is providing funding sufficient for the Blender Foundation to employ 2 full time developers. So these people will be Blender devs employed by the Blender Foundation, not Nvidia devs, though they will surely spend time working on support for Nvidia drivers/cards in Blender, and utilizing CUDA and RTX technologies to better effect. Nvidia were already cooperating with Blender devs on this but obviously there will now be more bandwidth and better info exchange, which must be good.
Likewise, I haven't seen anything to suggest that Epic Games are directly employing developers to work on Blender. When that grant was made, I saw a video made by Ton Rosendal who said much of the grant was aimed at improving the development process vis-a-vis better quality control, making it more 'professional' and less idiosyncratic. Whether you think that's going to be a good thing or not is another issue: on balance, I think good.
The Ubisoft Animation Studios link is interesting in that UAS are moving to Blender as their primary animation tool, which should mean that there will be improvements in Blender's animation tools as a result of more collaboration. I believe the hope is that UAS will be contributing some code back to Blender.
Always great to hear good news like this. Nvidia is one of the biggest boys in the industry, so their backing means a lot, and hopefully means more improvements to cycles.
I've found it easy to use for years; 3D though, well it isn't easy.
2 full time developers is enough to keep Blender's rendering using nVidia video cards in top shape. That was all about nVidia, not anything to do with Blender or Blender users really.
...probably not for Mac users
nothing much would happen in a meeting with them all, EPIC uses directX, who had to wait 14 years for microsoft to add tesselation to dx12, EPIC doesn't do graphic's besides call all ready coded framework functions, which is why they have aload of tools instead, while the engine is limited by polygons and texture size
you get better performance uses xenko engine and vulkan which is opensource and can easily handle a gen 8 model with 150k polys
That's something you need to take up with Apple. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But the Blender core is platform agnostic, so Mac users will still benefit.
Not sure I understood this. How is "keeping Blender's rendering using NVidia cards in top shape" nothing to do with Blender or Blender users? Is it NVidia who are going to render images, or Blender's users?
Because most always it is not in the average consumer's interest to spend that much money on new nVidia video cards time & time again There is only so much a render engine can do.Those that can afford nVidia cards that often certainly don't need to use Blender as their 3D modeling app either and won't be using it. Also AMD & the Pro Renderer is starting to make big inroads.
I only hope, that Nvidia will provide more money to Blender developers,
so they will continue to develop Blender and do not need to be worry about their expenses so much.
As far as I know, AMD (ATI) gave funds and support to Blender in the past. It is probably the reason why Nvidia does not want to stay out of the wayside. The entire industry needs people who create 3D and Blender has become a catalyst.
FYI, the Corporate Patron level info from the Blender Foundation page.
For Corporate Patron (120k/year or more) membership please contact us directly.
https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/
The blurb on the Blender Nation site:
https://www.blendernation.com/2019/10/07/nvidia-joins-blender-development-fund/
Oher organizations that are currently on the Blender Foundation list:
https://fund.blender.org/#credits-patron
Currently, only two organizations currently have memberships at that level, both mentioned above. Nvidia and Epic Megagrants (the Unreal Engine guys).
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/megagrants:
Carry on!
I don't know how to respond to this :)
One of the fantastic things about Blender/Cycles/Evee is that you don't have to have the latest greatest Nvidia card to use them (though an Nvidia card does help because some features of Cycles aren't available in OCL with Cycles). In fact, you can have a GPU with a modest amount of memory and still render with Cylcles because it uses out of core memory for large and/or memory intensive scenes (unlike Iray). Of course for those who have an ATI card, there is AMD Pro Render for Blender.
I think this, and all the other new support for Blender shows that the rewrite for Blender 2.8 was a huge step in the right direction. Of course the major improvement in the UI is what you hear about the most, but there were several other improvements under the hood that make it a much better product for larger productions. This should help Blender move forward at a much faster pace, and hopefully address other long standing shortcomings (like the improvements to the sculpting tools).
And... we can add Adidas and Embark Studios to the list. This is becoming a weekly occurrence.
But I REALLY want to know what Ton was so keen to talk to the Amazon reps for... :)
Add AMD to the list.
The new Blender 2.80 is super easy to use. It works very much like other 3D software and you don't have to rely on cryptic knowledge to use it.
I am working with a tutorial from Packt "Blender 2.8 Character Creation" by Darrin Lile and it is excellent. When I finish that I will be doing these DAZ courses:
https://www.daz3d.com/easy-modeling-and-morphing-with-blender
https://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-content-creation-with-blender