The Blender Foundation, the organization behind the popular open source 3D creation tool “Blender,” today announced that Apple has joined the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member to support continued core development for Blender.
“It’s a pleasure to announce that macOS will be back as a completely supported Blender platform,” notes Tom Roosendal, original creator of Blender and chair of The Blender Foundation. “This is another milestone for Blender’s mission to bring the best 3D technology as tools in the hands of artists, for all platforms, everywhere in the world, free and open source forever.”
The announcement from Blender notes that Apple will support Blender with engineering expertise and additional resources to help Blender artists and developers. The company will also make a contribution to the Blender Development Fund.
Alongside a contribution to the Development Fund, Apple will provide engineering expertise and additional resources to the Blender HQ and development community to help support Blender artists and developers.
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.
Blender is an open source 3D design and animation suite, used worldwide by professionals, students, and hobbyists.
A relative of mine who does 2D and 3D animations was glad to hear this news. Although he is a hardcore Mac user, he tells me that “I’ve been debating if I need to shift away from macs eventually if I want to keep doing 3D. Macs traditionally aren’t built to handle programs such as blender.”