Blender is a true community effort. It’s an open public project where everyone’s welcome to contribute. In the past year, a growing number of corporations started to contribute to Blender as well.

We’d like to credit the companies who helping out to make Blender 2.8 happen.

Tangent Animation

This animation studio released Ozzy last year, a feature film entirely made with Blender. They currently have 2 new films in production. The facility has two departments (Toronto, Winnipeg) and is growing to 150 people in 2017. They exclusively use Blender for 3D.

Since October 2016, Tangent supports two Blender Institute devs full time to work on the 2.8 viewport. They also hired their own Cycles developer team, who will be contributing openly.

Nimble Collective

Nimble Collective was founded by former Dreamworks animators. Their goal is to give artists access to a complete studio pipeline, accessible online by just using your browser.

Since their launch in 2016 Nimble Collective has seriously invested in integrating Blender in their platform. They currently support one full time developer position in Blender Institute to support animation tools (dependency graph) and pipelines (Alembic).

AMD

AMD is developing a prominent open source strategy, leading the way for FOSS graphics card drivers and the new open graphics standard Vulkan.
Since last summer 2016 AMD supports a developer to work on modernizing Blender OpenGL, and a developer to work on Cycles OpenCL (GPU) rendering.

Aleph Objects

Aleph Objects is the manufacturer of the popular Libre Hardware Lulzbot 3D printer.

Starting this year, Aleph Objects will support Blender Institute to hire two people to work full time on UI and Workflow topics for Blender 2.8, with as goal to deliver a release-compatible “Blender 101” + training material for occasional 3D users.

Development Fund Sponsors

The Blender Development fund is an essential instrument to keep Blender alive. Blender Foundation uses the Development fund and donations to support 2-3 full time developer positions. Big and loyal corporate sponsors to the fund are BlenderMarket , Cambridge Medical Robotics , Valve Steam Workshop , Blend4Web , CGCookie , Effetti Digitali , Insydium , Sketchfab , Wube Software , blendFX , Machinimatrix , Pepeland and RenderStreet.

Blender Institute

The studio of Blender Institute gets hardware seeds – for example we had servers from Intel and Dell, GPUs from AMD and Nvidia. Blender Institute uses Blender Cloud income, sponsoring and subsidies to support developers and artists to work on free/open movies and 3D computer graphics production pipelines. BI currently employs 14 people, including BF chairman Ton Roosendaal.