Microsoft Joined the Blender Development Fund as a Gold Member

July 29, Blender Foundation, the development team behind “Blender”, open-source software for creating 3D CG, announced that Microsoft has joined the “Blender Development Fund”.

Blender Development Fund is a fund that raises finance for Blender development. As a response to the increasing demands for 3D contents, it was founded to speed up the development pace, and it offers individual and corporate memberships.

There are three corporate membership levels: gold with $30,000 donation, silver $12,000, and bronze $6,000. Microsoft has joined the fund as a corporate gold member since July 1.

In addition to offering donation, Microsoft uses Blender to generate synthetic 3D models and images of humans to train AI models. Microsoft makes use of Blender at its research lab in Cambridge and has made a part of their work “Synthetic Data with Digital Humans” public. Microsoft says, “For researchers, having access to high quality free/opensource 3D software has proven to be the great benefit for scientific projects.”

There are over 40 companies that have already joined the Blender Development Fund, including AMD, NVIDIA, Epic MegaGrants, and the gold-member Intel and Ubisoft.

There are 6 different individual membership levels: diamond with $300 donation per month, titanium $120, platinum $60, gold $30, silver $12, and $6 bronze. More than 4,600 individuals have already joined the foundation. It is reported that the foundation receives over $108,000 in total a month.

Blender Foundation
https://www.blender.org/
Microsoft
https://www.microsoft.com
Synthetic Data with Digital Humans
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/09/2019-10-01-Synthetic-Data-with-Digital-Humans.pdf