Microsoft has just joined the Blender Development Fund as a Gold Sponsor, joining the likes of Epic Games, Ubisoft, AMD, and NVIDIA. Microsoft is currently using Blender in some in-house projects and will be supporting the Blender Development Fund to the tune of 30K Euro per year. Details of the deal from the Blender website:
Microsoft makes use of Blender to generate synthetic 3D models and images of humans that can be used to train AI models. For researchers, having access to high quality free/opensource 3D software has proven to be of great benefit for scientific projects. You can check some of their work here.
To express their support, Microsoft is joining the Blender Foundation’s Development Fund as a Corporate Gold member per July 1st, 2020.
We at Blender are very proud of this support statement, it’s another important signal that the industry migrates to open source and finds ways to contribute to it.
You can learn more about the announcement and development fund in the video below. If you are afraid of these corporate influences taking over Blender please be sure to watch this video as well.