Ubuntu-maker Canonical Will Support Open Source Blender on Windows, Mac, and Linux

An anonymous reader shares a report: Blender is one of the most important open source projects, as the 3D graphics application suite is used by countless people at home, for business, and in education. The software can be used on many platforms, such as Windows, Mac, and of course, Linux. Today, Ubuntu-maker Canonical announces it will offer paid enterprise support for Blender LTS. Surprisingly, this support will not only be for Ubuntu users. Heck, it isn't even limited to Linux installations. Actually, Canonical will offer this support to Blender LTS users on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

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[ArchieBunker]

Do they still send data to amazon?

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[Koen Lefever]

Is there no open source solution to compete with Unity or Unreal Engine?

Godot [godotengine.org]

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[Anonymous Coward]

and how long have people been waiting for that?

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[cb88]

What do you mean... it exists now and is in it's 3rd major release.

It doesn't look like all these developers are waiting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEDEIksGEjQ&t=144s

Re:Blender Game Engine

[Sneftel]

Nope. It turns out that making a game engine at the quality level of Unreal or Unity is a monumental undertaking and basically impossible for an unfunded team. Unlike something like Blender, a game engine will be obsolete in a few years if significant resources are not continually invested into its tech stack.

But if you want an open source game engine and are willing to set your sights lower, see OGRE or CrystalSpace or Panda3D or Godot or Delta3D or Nebula Device. All of which are... fine, particularly if you're not working in a large team and are just playing with stuff as a hobby and don't mind the generally obsolete rendering pipelines.

Re:Blender Game Engine

[Sneftel]

Rereading that, it seems to come off as awfully negative about those engines. Seriously, they are legitimately fine for general use. The quality of your average indie game is not limited by the engine it's using, but by the skill of its content creators and the amount of work that went into polish and QA. You don't need realtime raytracing to make an amazing game.

Big Buck Bunny

[JackieBrown]

They need to make a sequel to this! The world needs it :)

https://peach.blender.org/ [blender.org]

The announcement from Blender

[dskoll]

This was announced by Blender here [blender.org].

I wonder how long Canonical will stay focused on this, though, given their historical ADHD when it comes to sticking to anything?

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[dskoll]

I looked at Canonical's price list. $1000/year is the most expensive offering. If they end up making even $200K/year in revenue from this, I'd be very surprised. So I suspect this will quietly sink in a year's time.

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[ninjaz]

That's before you add in support revenues for the render farms for these shops whose server OS vendor would become obvious. :-)

Blender always melted my head

[ickleberry]

The interface confuses the feck out of me to the point that for 3D printing I just use OpenSCAD. Defining each item by code seems much more intuitive to me. How do people get into using Blender? anyone in the same boat?

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[bento]

:shrug: Blender makes a bunch of tradeoffs related to its interpretation of what a good production workflow should look like. But a bunch of the oddities are related to its history. Blender was a very early 3D editing application originally developed with IrisGL on the SGI (long before it was available to us mere mortals as a commercial application and later as open source when that didn't work out). It has an extremely modal interface which would probably make Larry Tessler [wikipedia.org] cry, but there's a logic to ho

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[cb88]

Blender's rough edges have gotten filed down about every several releases... and I expect that trend will continue.

Re:Blender always melted my head

[ip_vjl]

Well, for one thing, Blender isn't a parametric CAD application, it's a polygon modeler geared toward animation. So, for the types of things you'd make in OpenSCAD, I wouldn't pick Blender as my first choice. (Rendered images and animations are another story.)

If you want to stay within open source CAD apps, you'd be better off looking into FreeCAD or SolveSpace for designing 3D printed parts. (Though, if you are hindered by Blender's UI, I don't think you're going to love FreeCAD.)

Re: Blender always melted my head

[crobarcro]

FreeCAD as is far better than openscad and can be entirely scripted in python if you so wish

Blender Platform

[PineHall]

This shows that the OS (Linux, Windows, Mac) is not important any more. The platform is Blender in this case.

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[Ostracus]

Can't wait to start browsing slashdot through Blender.

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[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Eh? Are you using Windows 98 or something, browsing the web from Explorer?