Following quickly on the heels of last months Facebook Sponsorship of Blender, today it was announced Blender has a new corporate sponsor, Amazon AWS. This sponsorship is a bit different, in that it is aimed at improving a very specific aspect of Blender, character animation. The sponsorship will enable Blender to hire multiple developers to work over a period of 3 years on improving character animation tools in Blender.
Details of the announcement from the Blender news:
Today Blender Foundation announced that AWS has joined the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member to support continued core development and innovation for Blender. AWS committed to a period of three years, specifically to support character animation tools development.
“We’re excited to continue to expand our support for open source solutions for our customers in the digital content creation space.” said Kyle Roche, GM of Creative Tools. “The Blender Foundation has been an industry leader in providing production-grade open source software solutions, and we look forward to helping our mutual customers work more efficiently than ever before through continued improvements in Blender.”
Two years ago, Blender Foundation started a project to redesign and upgrade Blender’s character animation system for the coming decade. Nicknamed “Animation 2020” it has a number of specs that were reviewed by character animator and industry veteran Jason Schleifer, now Creative Director at AWS.
“It has always been my preference to work closely with industry talents on improving Blender,” said Blender chairman Ton Roosendaal. “Thanks to AWS’ support we can recruit additional top developers to help us bring character animation in Blender to new heights.”
Blender Foundation will start recruiting in the course of Q1 2021, pending the current travel and meeting restrictions being lifted or relaxed.
Amazon AWS, or Amazon Web Services is the massive cloud services portion of Amazon, which provides a great deal of the backbone of the modern internet. They also have gaming divisions including owning Twitch, as well as the recently updated Lumberyard game engine. Blender is an open source cross platform 3D application that supports modelling, animation, texturing, rendering, sculpting and more. Improvements to the character animation tools will be a welcome addition. Blender development is supported by the Blender Development Fund.
You can learn more about the Amazon AWS sponsorship in the video below.