Epic Games made a $ 1.2 million donation to the Blender Foundation

As part of its "Epic MegaGrants" financing program of $ 100 million, Epic Games, the developer of Unreal Engine and the famous game “Fortnite” made a donation in support of the Blender Foundation.

Since recently has awarded a cash donation of $ 1.2 million to the Blender Foundation with the aim of promoting the development of "Creative Software Suite Blender" which is a free open source 3D modeling system that provides a complete range of tools that allow artists to create graphics, animations, special effects and games in 3D.

These funds received at the Blender Foundation will be distributed in stages over the next three years. Since it is planned to spend the money on expanding the developer staff, attracting new participants, improving the coordination of work on the project and improving the quality of the code.

The Blender Foundation is a non-profit organization responsible for the development of free Blender 3D modeling software.

It provides the necessary resources to support the community formed around the use and development of its software.

“Having Epic Games on our side is a breakthrough for Blender,” said Ton Roosendaal, Founder and President of the Blender Foundation, adding: “With this grant, we will make a significant investment in organizing Our project to improve integration, coordination and best practices in code quality. As a result, we expect more industry contributors to join our projects.

“Libraries, platforms and open tools are critical to the future of the digital content ecosystem,” said Tim Sweeney, Founder and CEO of Epic Games, “Blender is a sustainable resource in the arts community. and our goal is to work for its development for the benefit of all creators. "

What is Epic MegaGrants and why do you make these donations?

The Epic MegaGrants Initiative in which $ 100 million in grants are allocated, is designed to support different game developers, business professionals, media and entertainment creators, educators, tool developers, and students doing exceptional work with the Unreal Engine, but also enhancing open source capabilities for the 3D graphics community.

According to Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games, open tools, libraries and platforms are critical to the future of the digital content ecosystem.

Blender is one of the most sought after tools in the community and therefore Epic Games is committed to promoting it for the benefit of all content creators.

Tim Sweeney also commented on the company's position on Linux, which is considered an excellent platform. Unreal Engine 4, Epic Online Services, and Easy Anti-Cheat are being developed for Linux in the form of native builds.

The company is also considering expanding the use of Wine as a means of running Linux games. from the Epic Games catalog.

The rumors about stopping the development of Easy Anti-Cheat for Linux are false: the native Linux version of this product is in beta testing and already offers anti-cheat support even for games released with Wine and Proton.

Finally It is important to remember that, within the next few days, it is expected that by July 19, if there are no problems with the testing of a candidate version, Blender 2.80 is expected to be released, which is one of the most important versions in the history of the project.

The new version completely changed the user interface, which has become familiar to users of other graphic editors and 3D packages.

New rendering engines Workbench for fast and easy rendering and Eevee for real-time rendering are introduced. Refurbished 3D Viewport.

Added a new system for working with 2D sketches as well as XNUMXD objects. The built-in game engine was removed, instead of what is now proposed to use third-party game engines.