Monday, July 25th, 2022 Posted by Jim Thacker

Epic Games joins the Open 3D Foundation


Epic Games has joined open-source game technology organisation the Open 3D Foundation (O3DF).

The move makes the Unreal Engine developer the newest – and possibly, the most unexpected – board member of the body overseeing the development of rival open-source game engine Open 3D Engine.

Overseeing development of the successor to Amazon’s Lumberyard game engine
Launched last year by the Linux Foundation, the O3DF is intended to “accelerate developer collaboration” on 3D game technology by supporting open-source graphics, rendering and development projects.

The first such project was Open 3D Engine, Amazon Web Services’ open-source successor to its Lumberyard, its free ‘AAA-capable’ game engine.

Premier members of the Open 3D Foundation included AWS itself, CG software developer Adobe, tech giants Intel, Microsoft and Huawei, and Pokémon Go co-developer Niantic.

Epic Games joins AWS, Adobe, Intel and Microsoft as an O3DF Premier member
To that list, we can now add Epic Games, whose vice president of Unreal Engine Ecosystem, Marc Petit, join’s O3DF’s governing board.

“The metaverse will require companies to work together to advance open standards and open-source tools, and we believe the Open 3D Foundation will play an important role in this journey,” he said.

“With shared standards for interoperability, we’re giving creators more freedom [to create] content using the tools they’re most comfortable with, [for use] in Unreal Engine and across other 3D engines.”

Not the first time Epic has backed its open-source rivals financially
Although it seems an unlikely match – the developer of one game engine on the development board of another – Epic Games does have a track record of supporting its open-source rivals.

In 2020, the firm awarded the developers of open-source game engine Godot $250,000 from its Epic MegaGrants fund, and has also backed open-source art tools including ArmorPaint, Blender and Krita.

“We applaud Epic Games’ commitment to the open source community,” said Royal O’Brien, executive director of Open 3D Foundation and general manager of games and digital media at the Linux Foundation.

“It’s truly exciting to see how the industry is responding to the real-time 3D needs of content creators.”


Read Open 3D Foundation’s announcement that Epic Games has joined as a Premier member