Ubisoft, or more specifically Ubisoft Animation Studio, has just joined the Blender Foundation as a gold sponsor. The Blender Foundation Development Fund is a way for individuals and corporations to contribute financially to the development of Blender. Additionally, UAS will be adopting Blender 2.80 for future animation projects.
Details from the Blender news:
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.
Pierrot Jacquet, Head of Production at Ubisoft Animation Studio says “Blender was for us an obvious choice: Its strong and engaged community paired up with the vision carried by the Blender Foundation makes it one of the most creative DCC of the market.”
“Good news keeps coming” says Blender founder and chairman Ton Roosendaal, “it’s such a miracle to witness the industry jumping on board with us! I’ve always admired Ubisoft, as one of the leading games and media producers in the world. I look forward to work with them and help them finding their ways as a contributor to our open source projects on blender.org.“
As well as from Ubisoft:
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 less time we could 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.
The above is only a portion of the complete Ubisoft interview about their plans for using Blender and open source in the future. If you are interested in supporting Blender, be sure to check out details on the Corporate Developer Fund available here or here (PDF).