A big step for 3D: Apple now supports Blender development

Blender’s interface helps artists create powerful work

Apple has become a patron member of the Blender Development Fund, supporting the work of the Blender Foundation, which itself supports the free and open-source 3D creation suite of the same name.

Blender has extensive industry support

This is a quietly significant move. Blender is free open-source 3D computer graphics software that is already used in movies, visual effects, 3D, motion graphics, VR and games development.

It may also be important to point out that Adobe joined the Blender Development Fund in July 21. Other supporters now include: Canonical, AWS, Facebook, Ubisoft, Unity and Microsoft.

Apple will support the Foundation to help support Blender artists and developers.

To that end, it will:

• Contribute to the Development Fund.
• Provide engineering expertise.
• Provide additional resources to Blender’s HQ and development community.

What is Blender?

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that first appeared in 1994, with v.1 made available one year later, in ’95.

It supports creativity across the 3D process: modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation.

You can create primitives, engage in digital sculpting, model surfaces, and simulate all kinds of fluid and particle effects. It’s also good for post-production, compositing, rendering, and so much more.

That’s why Ubisoft Animation adopted the solution to replace its internal content creation tools in 2020.

What is the Blender Development Fund?

According to Blender, the Blender Development Fund accepts donations to “support activities to provide free and open accessible services for all Blender contributors – including professionals and corporations – on the blender.org websites.”

Who uses Blender?

Long a standard tool in the 3D, CGI and graphic design industries, Blender has seen extensive use everywhere.

Among other notable plaudits, we know it was used in the making of Apple TV+’s Wolfwalkers (below), Warcraft, Next Gen, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Spider-Man 2 and numerpis other movies, games and TV shows.

Even NASA has used it.

“Advanced users employ Blender’s API for Python scripting to customize the application and write specialized tools; often these are included in Blender’s future releases.”

The cross-platform software – often called the “Swiss army knife of 3D modelling” is already in wise use by individual users and small studios. (I can’t remember the first time I wrote about this solution, but suspect it was the late ‘90’s). You can look at a collection of Blender-based projects here.

Blender is a community-driven project under the GNU General Public License (GPL). That means anyone can change the code base, which helps create an environment that generates new features, fast responses to bugs and more.

Other applications of its kind include Maya, Cinema 4D, ZBrush and SketchUp. And it’s not so long ago when applications of this kind being made available on the Mac was front page news. These days pretty much every creative app is available for the platform, all of which benefit from the use of Apple’s M-series chips.

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