This month Unity Technologies joined the Blender Development Foundation as a Patron Member.
Supporting Blender
Patron Membership is the highest level of support for the Blender Development Foundation and Unity joins other big names like AMD, Nvidia and Epic Games. This news signals that Unity recognizes Blender software as an important and essential digital tool for creative and technical pipelines across a range of industries.
“Ten years ago Unity already offered support for Blender files to Unity users,” said Blender Foundation founder and chairman Ton Roosendaal. “Thanks to the grant we will continue investing in Blender core development, with particular focus on high-quality interoperability with free and open formats.”
Unity Technology’s involvement gains Blender another industry heavyweight and additional funding for development.
The latest Development Fund memberships have pushed the monthly donations over 100k euro, which will support 20 people to work on core Blender development full-time.
“At Unity, we believe the world is a better place with more creators in it. This has always been at the core of our business. As such, our values align with those of the Blender Foundation and it seems a natural fit to continue our support of an open ecosystem that enables millions of users to create 3D content with a free tool,” said Dave Rhodes, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Unity Create Solutions, Unity Technologies.
About Blender Foundation
The Blender Foundation (2002) is an independent public benefit organization with the purpose to provide a complete, free and open source 3D creation pipeline, managed by public projects on blender.org. The foundation offers grants to individual contributors to Blender, worldwide.
Its spin-off corporation Blender Institute (2007) has been established in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, it hosts the foundation’s offices and currently employs over 20 people who work on the Blender software and creative projects to validate and stress Blender in production environments.