Epic Games Is Supporting Blender's Development

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Epic Games Is Supporting Blender's Development

Epic Games has begun financially supporting the open-source Blender modeling software to improve the workflow for artists with Unreal Engine 4...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTc0MDg

[schmidtbag]

I am growing very fond of Epic lately.

[peppercats]

This is good news. I'm very much an amateur 3D modeler(I only do it sometimes - I learned enough to fully understand the pipeline for my work.), I found blender good enough. I've talked to a few (professional) 3D artists about blender and most of the complaints amount to 'nobody uses/teaches blender so I don't want to waste my time learning it'

[kpedersen]

I am growing very fond of Epic lately.

Heh, yeah me too. These guys are effectively pioneering the games development industry on Linux and other open platforms recently!

I bought a subscription to the Unreal Engine but I actually wish they took donations too.

With this news, it might actually tempt the sheep of the gamedev world to actually look towards Blender as a viable tool now.

[M@yeulC]

This is some great news, but I hope this is not an isolated donation. If they want blender to become a great 3D modeling tool for their engine, I hope they will donate even more to this cause. (I am not saying $10 000 is nothing: it's a lot, but a ponctual donation). I think the blender devs would fell more engaged if Epic agreed to donate, say (this is a random estimate) $250 per month to the blender foundation.
Again, this is a rough estimate, the numbers here are not relevant. It could be 100, 500 or even 10000, but this was just to expose my point of view.

Anyway, good game, epic. I am starting to forgive you your Unreal Engine 3 move with no linux support. We do not know that many big (gaming) companies which are open-source friendly. I may even subscribe to your UE repository, when I will be able to afford it

[Guest]

Anyway, good game, epic. I am starting to forgive you your Unreal Engine 3 move with no linux support. We do not know that many big (gaming) companies which are open-source friendly. I may even subscribe to your UE repository, when I will be able to afford it

My only issue with Unreal Engine (3+) is the dependence of PhysX. Was absolute garbage performance-wise with PhysX 2 when CPU-accelerated, but I think I heard NVIDIA improved it a bit with PhysX 3. But of course it has to be left with a certain level of lackluster performance overall so the GPU-accelerated PhysX can shine/be a viable marketing point

[schmidtbag]

My only issue with Unreal Engine (3+) is the dependence of PhysX. Was absolute garbage performance-wise with PhysX 2 when CPU-accelerated, but I think I heard NVIDIA improved it a bit with PhysX 3. But of course it has to be left with a certain level of lackluster performance overall so the GPU-accelerated PhysX can shine/be a viable marketing point

Even though I primarily use AMD cards now, I'm a fan of physx. It puts GREAT use to retired GPUs and it's one of those "why not?" things to add to a game. If you're lucky to have support for it, great. If not, you can still enjoy the game anyway. It'd be nice if something like Havok utilized openCL though, that way you could use something like IGPs to process physics.

[Blahblah]

Very nice of them to do that, I hope they will be rewarded in the long run for their recent moves.

[Calinou]

Their donation is purely for their usage.

To people who believe buying their games helps Blender: you can donate to the Blender Foundation directly if you wish; this way, you're sure all the money goes to the foundation.

[sunweb]

Epic released the source code but didn't port a damn thing to Linux, community did/is_doing.
Epic released benchmarks, ok, big work is done here, extremely big.
Epic gave money to BF so that they could write fbx support(cuz money is the biggest factor when it comes to coding proprietary format support). Its surelly better than have support of native blend format(improve it if needed) in engine that wouldn't be sabotage by Autodesk anytime soon or complete integration via python addon.

And some users say that Epic did something?