Microsoft joins the Blender Development Fund

What is Blender
Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline.

Microsoft makes use of Blender to generate synthetic 3D models and images of humans that can be used to train AI models. For researchers, having access to high quality free/opensource 3D software has proven to be of great benefit for scientific projects.

To express their support, Microsoft is joining the Blender Foundation’s Development Fund as a Corporate Gold member per July 1st, 2020.

What is The Blender Foundation

The Blender Development Fund accepts donations to support activities to provide free and open accessible services for all Blender contributors – including professionals and corporations – on the blender.org websites. Support activities include bug fixing, code reviews, technical documentation and onboarding.

The fund will also provide grants and subsidies to developers on generic and widely agreed development projects.