Epic Games has given $1.2 million to the Blender Foundation through its Epic MegaGrants program, money that the Blender Foundation then plans to use to fund its own Professionalizing Blender Development initiative.
Epic MegaGrants is a $100 million dev fund set up by Unreal Engine maker Epic Games as a sort of successor to its previous Unreal Dev Grants program which seeks to distribute cash to support development-focused parties doing “outstanding work with Unreal Engine or enhancing open-source capabilities for the 3D graphics community.”
The Blender Foundation is the nonprofit behind the open source 3D creation tool Blender, a program Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney calls “an enduring resource within the artistic community” in a press release announcing the grant distribution.
“Open tools, libraries, and platforms are critical to the future of the digital content ecosystem,” said Sweeney. “Blender is an enduring resource within the artistic community, and we aim to ensure its advancement to the benefit of all creators.”
In that same post, Blender Foundation founder and chairman Ton Roosendaal says that the funds enable the organization to make a “significant investment in our project organization to improve onboarding, coordination and best practices for code quality.”