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The Blender team today are making quite the super-effective splash about the Blender 2.93 LTS release mentioning how it's been "20 years in the making".

Why the big splash then? What's going on? Well they say they're "paving the way for the next generation open source 3D creation pipeline". Not only is this a long-term support release, meaning it has at least a 2 year life-span of fixes so it can be used for big projects, they're also ramping up work officially on Blender 3.0. Back in April 2021, it also marked 10 years since the Cycles rendering engine was announced. Lots of big milestones have been hit for Blender lately. Some of their plans you can see in their previous roadmap.

Check out their release feature overview video below:

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Blender is a hugely important free and open source project, one used from video games to movies it's a clear example of how FOSS can thrive.

See the full release announcement and the release notes for the full details.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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scaine Jun 2, 2021
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Such a massive project, this is amazing news. I had no idea of the money being thrown at Blender, but it looks like AMD, Nvidia and Unity all donate massively on a monthly basis, and it wasn't all that long ago that Epic also threw over a million dollars at them!

They're on $135K/month, funding 20 developers full time. I wish more FOSS projects got this kind of support, but it's great to see Blender go from strength to strength!
gradyvuckovic Jun 3, 2021
Blender devs still embarrassing the competition with their breakneck pace. It's working too, gone are the days where people would ask me at work what I'm using and sound puzzled when I said Blender. These days when there's a new hire, usually the answer from them is "Oh I use Blender, it's actually really awesome, it's open source too, have you heard of Blender?!".

These performance improvements are really adding up for Cycles, and the geometry nodes are growing with each update, they're going to become a killer feature of Blender.

Blender is OP!
BeedrillSwarm Jun 3, 2021
what a time for foss
ElectricPrism Jun 3, 2021
Imagine we could do for GIMP what has been done for Blender, what an amazing thing that would be.

In a world with Adobe SaaS I could imagine many rich companies throwing some coin at the FOSS Sauce to save money in the future.
Ham_Taro Jun 3, 2021
Why are those company funding Blender?
Liam Dawe Jun 3, 2021
Quoting: ElectricPrismImagine we could do for GIMP what has been done for Blender, what an amazing thing that would be.
Will never happen while it's called GIMP.
Doc Angelo Jun 3, 2021
Quoting: Ham_TaroWhy are those company funding Blender?

I guess because Blender is a fundamental element in game development, and more games developed means more business for these companies.
robertosf92 Jun 3, 2021
Quoting: Ham_TaroWhy are those company funding Blender?

My bet is that they think it can serve as an Autodesk (3ds Max, Maya) replacement, where for maybe less money (Most drop 30K a year) you can actually get to have a voice in the foundation, so for less money (probably) you get more gain.

Can this happen with GIMP? Not in quite some time, I think. Maybe Godot can slowly take some of Unity's market share, but I'm not sure.

Libreoffice is another one where you might see, if 1) DOCX support improves or 2)Institutoins around the world adopt ODF as the standard format. Less cost, more control over the final product you get, I think it's the best way it could go, tbh
Ehvis Jun 3, 2021
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Quoting: robertosf92Can this happen with GIMP? Not in quite some time, I think.

Don't think so either. For professional level 3D modellers/renderers there was a huge market gap. For a lot of supporting parties there is a clear benefit of having one sit in a place that was affordable to regular people and companies just starting out. This is not really the case for image manipulation where Adobe stepped in to serve that segment by itself.
CatKiller Jun 3, 2021
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Quoting: Liam Dawe
Quoting: ElectricPrismImagine we could do for GIMP what has been done for Blender, what an amazing thing that would be.
Will never happen while it's called GIMP.
Unfortunately, the project for GIMP-that's-not-called-GIMP withered on the vine.
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