'Fortnite' Creator Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation With $1.2 Million

Long-time Slashdot reader dnix writes: Apparently having a lot of people playing Fortnite is good for the open source community too. Epic Games' MegaGrants program just awarded the Blender Foundation with $1.2 million over the next three years...to further the success of the free and open source 3D creation suite.
It's part of the company's $100 million "MegaGrants" program, according to the announcement. "Open tools, libraries and platforms are critical to the future of the digital content ecosystem," said Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games. "Blender is an enduring resource within the artistic community, and we aim to ensure its advancement to the benefit of all creators."

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, we made it like that to keep weenies like you away from us.

Re:

[Kaenneth]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Could help fund a rewrite of Blender in Rust

[Anonymous Coward]

A donation like that could go a long way toward funding a rewrite of Blender using the new Rust programming language. I think that rendering software like Blender could really benefit from the parallelism and distributed computing that Rust makes so easy. Rust's excellent security can't hurt, either. Plus with Rust quickly becoming the most used language among new programmers, Blender would be positioning itself well for getting more contributors in the future.

Re:

[Narcocide]

No.

Re:

[Narcocide]

All false.

Re: Could help fund a rewrite of Blender in Rust

[jimtheowl]

Claiming that "new programmers" do not know languages like C and C++ is like saying that "new architects do not understand materials like steel and concrete because they learned their skills playing with legos".

If you call yourself a programmer and cannot be bothered to learn another language when you need to, you are a linguist that only knows and want to speak English.

Re:

[rtb61]

Technically that would a 'writer' who only wants to write in English. The problem is there are too many programming languages all written with core logic English and maths writing styles written logically in. Instead based around the idiosyncrasies of the corporation who paid for it in the hopes of dominating the entire computing industry and getting a percentage of all revenue from ALL SOFTWARE, INFINITE PROFITS, FOREVER, blargh, cough, gurgle, maniacal giggles. The world would be a nicer place if that wer

Re: Could help fund a rewrite of Blender in Rust

[c0p0n]

Software development in the real world 101: rewrites, and especially rewrites on a different language, are great ways to kill a project.

Rewrite vs Evolve

[DrYak]

Try evolving it to another language.

That is *litteraly* what Firefox is doing. See their "swapping an airplane's egine mid-flight" metaphor (Quantum project).

They are litterally throwing small bit of Rust here and there, while the importing new features from their test platform (Servo) into their current production software (Firefox) while moving small atomic steps at a time (the whole concept around Quantum).

See? The alternative is worse.

The alternative was what Netscape did, when they decided to rewrite their whole Internet Suite fom the ground up in XUL.
It didn't bode

NT vs Win 9x/Me

[DrYak]

For surely you are as happy as I, that there is NT, and we are not still using some monstrous successor to Windows ME.

The big difference is that by that time NT has already been written, tested, and used in production on workstation. It was a stable product, but mostly marketed business-only.
With too much reliance on legacy and backward compatibility holding back the home users on Win 9x.

Win ME was Microsoft's attempt to progressively include more modern features into the old code base, so not to alienate users relying on legacy, while bringing modernity.
Except that Microsoft being Microsoft, they botched this badly (rushe

Re:

[Kaenneth]

Any competent programmer can create a new language for the task at hand.

I made a bytecode language for a game AI when I was in middle school in the 80's, and worked on the C# team at MS.

Re:

[Joce640k]

Real programmers can write FORTRAN code in any other language.

Re:Could help fund a rewrite of Blender in Rust

[RoccamOccam]

Just to be clear, this is the hot new troll - pretending to be a Rust advocate trying desperately to get everything rewritten in Rust. Ignore it.

Gotta buy some better PR somehow

[thegarbz]

All the negative PR from fragmenting the gaming industry while pissing off gamers with store exclusives all to make your store relevant must be getting to them.

Update the video editor!

[ikhider]

Blender founder, Ton Roosendaal, told me that the video editor in Blender is deprecated and they are looking to hire someone to update the video editing component and will pay such a person. However, the developer would need to be specially trained to develop this part. It is sort of like a domino effect because when you tweak one area in Blender, it affects everything else. The developer would have to keep in mind the whole program at all times. I have used the Blender video editor for projects and noticed poor playback performance when the video is longer than five minutes, even with proxies. It's a shame because Blender has a potential to be a superb video editing program.

Re: Update the video editor!

[Anonymous Coward]

while blender is a quite competitive 3d modelling suite and indeed has the potential to be a nice video editor, i donât think this should really happen. rather split this part away from the program and keep the focus on 3d editing. though, iâd love to have a video editor / compositing app that uses blenderâs keyframing system - itâs already way ahead of after effects in this regard, imho

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[exomondo]

The announcement of BlenderOS, a new Linux-based operating system, is imminent.

Great

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Albeit this news is a week old [blender.org] and there's nothing to discuss. Must be a slow news day.

Re:

[RavenLrD20k]

You must be new here... wait... you're UID is 6 Digits. Did you buy it off of someone or is it senility affecting your judgement? /. has always been a news aggregater, only the focused subjects have changed from strictly Tech to anything tangentially related to tech. As such, dupes and stale stories have always been a thing.