Otoy backs the Blender Development Fund
OctaneRender developer Otoy has begun backing the Blender Development Fund.
Otoy’s Corporate Patron membership guarantees at least €240,000/year in funding for the open-source 3D software: roughly the salaries of four full-time Blender developers.
The latest Corporate Patron of the Blender Development Fund
Although Otoy doesn’t seem to have announced the funding officially, Blender Foundation Chairman Ton Roosendaal told CG Channel that the firm became a member of the Blender Development Fund in December.
Otoy was previously a primary sponsor of last year’s Blender Conference.
Other current Corporate Patrons include tech giants AMD and Amazon, game developer – and fellow rendering software developer – Epic Games, and automotive firm Volkswagen.
One of the first major developers of production renderers to release a Blender integration
Otoy has catered to Blender users for over a decade, launching its Blender integration plugin for OctaneRender, its GPU production renderer, in 2013.
The move made OctaneRender one of the first major commercial renderers to have an official Blender integration.
Since 2019, Blender users have been able to use the renderer for free on a single GPU via its OctaneRender Prime edition.
Otoy also includes the Blender integration with the free edition of Octane X, the Metal-native macOS edition of the renderer, which is also limited to a single GPU.
Using OctaneRender on multiple GPUs, or in network renders, requires a paid subscription.