Hot off the heels of Epic Games pledging $1.2 million to the Blender Foundation as part of its Epic MegaGrants program, Ubisoft has announced that it will be joining the company’s Development Fund. As a corporate Gold member, the publisher will provide support for Blender developers. It will also utilize Blender for Ubisoft Animation Studio projects among other things.
Pierrot Jacquet, who is the Head of Production at Ubisoft Animation Studio said, “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.” In addition to the above, Ubisoft will also have developers contributing to open source projects for Blender.
Blender founder and chairman Ton Roosendaal added, “Good news keeps coming. 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.”
In a subsequent interview on Ubisoft’s official site, Jacquet said that he feels that the soon-to-be-released Blender 2.8 is a “game-changer for the CGI industry.” Apparently, more of the studio’s artists have expressed interest in it for production purposes thanks to its revamped UX, EEVEE real-time rendering, and other features. It will be interesting to see what the studio does with Blender, especially given its success with animation projects like the Rabbids Invasion TV show.