Mike Peterson
Apple has joined the Blender Development Fund as a patron member, pledging monetary contribution, engineering expertise, and additional resources to the 3D graphics tool.
Blender on Thursday announced Apple's joining of the Blender Development Fund, stating that the company will support the "continued core development for Blender." Blender is an open-source 3D graphics tool.
In addition to a contribution, Apple will also provide engineering expertise and other resources to both Blender's team and the broader development community. Apple's contributions will "help support Blender artists and developers."
The CEO of Blender, Tom Soosendaal, on Thursday also noted that macOS will return as a completely supported Blender platform. Apple has also issued a patch to the Metal backend for Cycles GPU rendering on Mac platforms.
This has been in the making for a while. I'm very proud to share this news today. macOS will be back as a complete supported Blender platform. Thanks Apple!
— Ton Roosendaal (@tonroosendaal) October 14, 2021
Blender says its development fund provides free and openly accessible services to all Blender contributors. Some of the support activities made possible by the fund include bug fixing, code reviews, technical documentation, and onboarding.
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9 Comments
This is great news, hopefully Apple will lend their expertise and monetary support to more open source projects.
This is such good news. Fortunately, some companies that began on the Mac all those years ago, such as Wolfram with Mathematica, have continued to support the platform more or less equally whereas others such as National Instruments provide now just token support. With its tight integration of hardware and operating system, Mac OS, in concert with iOS, could support breathtaking, utterly compelling applications.
This is a great move and will help 3D creatives a lot, I always wondered why they weren't supporting them when other big companies were but it seems they've been working with them a while and just announcing it now. The Apple Silicon Macs are well suited for this because of the unified memory that allows for lots of large textures to be loaded into memory. An 8k texture uses around 268MB of memory, even just 10-20 objects in a scene with multiple textures can start running out of video memory on higher-end machines. Modern games at 8K do the same, Battlefield was tested here at 8K needing up to 16GB VRAM:
https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/9957/battlefield-2042-open-beta-benchmarked-at-8k-16gb-vram-required/index.html
If the Pro Apple Silicon allows for up to 64GB unified memory, they can allow for 32-48GB of video memory on a laptop. This brings mobile closer to the capability of the Mac Pro that has up to 64GB video memory on its GPUs.
Apple has submitted some work on Metal for their rendering engine. This will be needed to tap into the GPU power available on Apple's chips. The CPUs will still be fast but Metal will likely allow up to 10x faster rendering than the CPU.
https://developer.blender.org/T92212
https://developer.blender.org/rBa0f269f682dab848afc80cd322d04a0c4a815cae
https://developer.blender.org/p/michael_jones/
The engineer who submitted the patch has been at Apple since October last year:
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/michael-jones-3a742864
He may have been influential in pushing for this support. He has experience in visual FX and gaming, working for The Foundry and even Microsoft before Apple.
The timing of the announcement is interesting given the Pro Mac hardware next week. Maybe they'll demo some 3D capability like they did on M1 with Maya. The Metal patches don't look complete yet though so they might not be able to show the rendering but even viewport stuff using cinema quality assets would be a good enough demo.
What else would be good is some kind of way to use iPads as they can enable 3D texture painting and sculpting using the Apple Pencil, especially with continuity. People are already experimenting with this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GS4a9AaPs8
There's also live facial animation tracking via the iPhone's face sensor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I92hsMt-nIg
This can be used for game creation as well as post-production and AR. It's very nice to see this kind of official support and involvement, 3rd parties don't all have the resources to support Metal and Mac users lose out on good tools. AMD figured this out too and made their own rendering engine so that they wouldn't have to rely on 3rd parties supporting OpenCL. Redshift will be another option for rendering too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCqdm_5Tayc