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Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

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Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#11

Post by orbifold »

andybak wrote: post #7
KingFelix wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup! So stoked on the work they are doing. Epic has been funding some awesome projects / people. I am really stoked on what they are doing. I can only imagine if other companies with Epic levels of cash were doing the same thing. I love it, and support all the stuff they are doing. Tim Sweeney is a good guy. Looking forward to see what else they come up with

> Tim Sweeney is a good guy Not knocking the donation per se but it's a bit easier to be a good guy when you're sitting on the world's biggest pile of kid's pocket money. Several friends have stories along the lines of their children taking not spending any money on their summer holidays because they want to save it for Fortnite hats or whatever. It's carefully designed smack for kids and there has to be a certain am…

There always have been money extraction schemes targeted at kids Pokémon, Magic the Gathering and so on come to mind. It is the parents responsibility to counter that.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#12

Post by Cyph0n »

andybak wrote: post #7
KingFelix wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup! So stoked on the work they are doing. Epic has been funding some awesome projects / people. I am really stoked on what they are doing. I can only imagine if other companies with Epic levels of cash were doing the same thing. I love it, and support all the stuff they are doing. Tim Sweeney is a good guy. Looking forward to see what else they come up with

> Tim Sweeney is a good guy Not knocking the donation per se but it's a bit easier to be a good guy when you're sitting on the world's biggest pile of kid's pocket money. Several friends have stories along the lines of their children taking not spending any money on their summer holidays because they want to save it for Fortnite hats or whatever. It's carefully designed smack for kids and there has to be a certain am…

> because they want to save it for Fortnite hats or whatever.

You could easily replace "Fortnite hats" with "Pokemon cards", "Yugioh cards", "Gameboy games", "MMO items", "Starcraft expansions", etc.

The difference with Epic is that they've managed to take a much larger chunk of the market, which is why parents have started to notice it more.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#13

Post by TrevorJ »

nailer wrote: post #4

This is really smart move that helps Epic more than you might think. UE4's own tools (which are based around creating environments from existing models, placing actors, and realtime rendering) are WORLDS ahead of common Autodesk modelling tools eg 3DS Max and Maya (which Epic itself uses). UE4 is easy to pick up, but then you have to learn Maya and it becomes a grind. There needs to be something as powerful as Maya w…

There's no real comparison between a game engine and a modeling/animation package. They are built to do very different things. However, it is definitely in Epic's best interest to support a robust and freely available tool for the content creation side of things.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#14

Post by gibolt »

orbifold wrote: post #11
andybak wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tim Sweeney is a good guy Not knocking the donation per se but it's a bit easier to be a good guy when you're sitting on the world's biggest pile of kid's pocket money. Several friends have stories along the lines of their children taking not spending any money on their summer holidays because they want to save it for Fortnite hats or whatever. It's carefully designed smack for kids and there has to be a certain am…

There always have been money extraction schemes targeted at kids Pokémon, Magic the Gathering and so on come to mind. It is the parents responsibility to counter that.

As adults not participating, it feels like a waste of money. The rewards aren't 'valuable'.

To the kids, the cost is worth it, bringing them happiness, social experiences, and a fun childhood to look back on. As long as it the amount doesn't get unreasonable relative to the means of their parents, it may be a good investment.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#15

Post by Danieru »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #10

I hope it's no strings attached.

We received a devgrsnt for our video game about two years back. The grants are super no strings attached. Epic is by far the nicest organization to work with in the video game industry. Yet that was even before the Fortnite money.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#18

Post by Someone1234 »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #10

I hope it's no strings attached.

You can read more about Epic's MegaGrants here:

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/megagrants

It doesn't look like it has many (any?) strings. Aside from being split over three years in Blender's case.

It is worth considering that this is in Epic's best interests as Blender + Unreal Engine is a common platform for startups/indie devs.

Making Blender better may make the games that people develop using Unreal Engine better, which might mean higher license income for Epic. So it is a win for Epic and a win for Blender/the community.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#19

Post by andybak »

Cyph0n wrote: post #12
andybak wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tim Sweeney is a good guy Not knocking the donation per se but it's a bit easier to be a good guy when you're sitting on the world's biggest pile of kid's pocket money. Several friends have stories along the lines of their children taking not spending any money on their summer holidays because they want to save it for Fortnite hats or whatever. It's carefully designed smack for kids and there has to be a certain am…

> because they want to save it for Fortnite hats or whatever. You could easily replace "Fortnite hats" with "Pokemon cards", "Yugioh cards", "Gameboy games", "MMO items", "Starcraft expansions", etc. The difference with Epic is that they've managed to take a much larger chunk of the market, which is why parents have started to notice it more.

Yep. And I have qualms over some of those things too.

I guess it's a tricky one as toys are not really much different despite having a physical manifestation. I would have happily spent every penny I could get my hands on on Star Wars figures when I was of that age. Is marketing a useless blob of plastic to kids any different to marketing a useless bunch of bytes?

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#20

Post by MrLeap »

This is great!

As a slighty OT aside, I really hope blender's UI changes sloooow down. I've been using it for 16 years. 2.8 versus 2.7 is so different, It almost feels like they're making changes for change sake.

I've been trying to use their various 2.8 RC's so I don't have to say I don't know how to use blender anymore when it pops.

They made the following things toggleable at launch, but man these are some muscle memory breaking changes that are now the default.

- Changed selecting objects from right to left click - Space bar no longer opens up the function search. The search is like 50% of my workflow, so this one hit me in the gut until I changed the setting.

Then there's some other things that feel renamed for no discernible reason.

- I can't search for 'remove doubles' anymore. There are certain geometries that I've come to build by snapping to axis, extruding, snapping to vertices, remove doubles. Now it's buried in a menu at mesh->clean up->'merge by distance'. It also makes a GUI element pop with the distance argument, and there's no obvious way to "apply". So weird. - Ambient occlusion in the view appears to have been renamed 'cavity'. - The tool panel lost its words, it's now just icons. Functionality has to be discovered by hovering. This is the worst UX habit from mobile, I wish it would stay out of my desktop tooling. - The view/selection/snap/etc settings bar has moved from the bottom of the screen to the top. Why? - Properties tabs moved to the side from the top. I can see why. - I can't make objects unselectable but visible in the outliner. Why?! - Layers are gone, they're now "collections" but they don't do the same thing at all!

This is the stuff I've hit in a about 2 hours of messing. I'm willing to acclimate to about 90% of these changes. So far it's just the layers / merge doubles thing that really sucks. Eevee is really pretty, so it's got that going for it, which is nice.

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