
Unity Joins the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member - mepian
https://www.blender.org/press/unity-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-a-patron-member/
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mkaic
I can without a doubt say that Blender is my number one favorite piece of
software I’ve ever used! The speed of development is breakneck now, but the
program still runs solid and stable, and the community around the program is
excellent, too!

~~~
ehvatum
Amen to that! In another life, SoftImage 3D was my favorite tool. Then
Microsoft bought it. Then Autodesk, the software graveyard tar pit, bought it
and petrified it for all eternity. There will never be any more SoftImage
development.

Can’t happen to Blender. Blender will always be free and cross platform. Learn
Blender and use it for life.

~~~
tmzt
Given how Blender came into being (acquired a product facing an economic dead
end), never say never. There could be other products out there barely breaking
even for companies that could be rescued by foundations.

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panpanna
Great move by unity, a lot of indie devs use blender since then can afford/use
commercial 3D tools.

I might be wrong, but last I checked unity had drag-n-drop support for Blender
models.

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slimsag
I use Unity's Blender integration extensively. It just invokes blender's CLI
to convert .blend -> .fbx for you automatically, which is nice.

However, only very simple material properties are imported. Multi-textured
objects, materials with specific BSDF properties, etc. are basically ignored
entirely and you have to manually reproduce them in Unity after the fact. It's
very annoying.

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warent
Perhaps with this news this is soon a thing of the past

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tomovo
It would be a good start if the Principled shader could be imported with some
degree of fidelity. A lot can be done with just that one..

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hirako2000
Can't happen without parity, or at least mapping between Unity and blender
rendering engine.

Materials is complicated enough that they should probably not attempt to port.
Unity ships with real time rendering features that blender doesn't have, so
anyhow stuff will be fine in unity itself. It leaves blender plenty useful for
mesh modeling, uv mapping, rigging and animation.

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makapuf
While this might be a case of "commoditize your complement", it's also a great
news for Blender which is by the day becoming a really solid offering in 3d.
Remembering the weird but promising NaN versions (before being acquired by the
community to open source it), this is great news.

~~~
rubito
I think Blender is already at to top when it comes to 3D, although it lacks
the integration into professional creative pipelines/workflows.

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asutekku
Has blender made progress on their UV tools? Last time I used it, they were
miles behind what Maya / 3ds Max offered and honestly, for me, that’s a part
of the process i would prefer to be as smooth as possible.

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buovjaga
At least there are open source add-ons for UV manipulation in active
development:

[https://github.com/nutti/Magic-UV](https://github.com/nutti/Magic-UV)

[https://github.com/leukbaars/DreamUV](https://github.com/leukbaars/DreamUV)

[https://github.com/SavMartin/TexTools-
Blender](https://github.com/SavMartin/TexTools-Blender)

Incremental improvements are going into the core tools, though, just by
looking at the user manual history:
[https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/BM/history/trunk/ble...](https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/BM/history/trunk/blender_docs/manual/modeling/meshes/editing/uv.rst)

The manual page:
[https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/meshes/ed...](https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/meshes/editing/uv.html)

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thordenmark
Like Nokia and Blackberry when the iPhone came out. Autodesk is about to pass
into irrelevance as Blender becomes the tool of choice for developers. I've
used 3ds Max and Maya professionally since the 90's, and while they still have
more functionality, Blender is improving and becoming more functional with
each release and is quickly coming up to par. I'd argue Blender has better UI
and is more stable than those programs. The Blender community is fantastic as
well.

