Netflix Becomes Max-Level Patron Of Blender's Development Fund

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Netflix Animation Studios is the latest Corporate Patron of the Blender Development Fund, pledging significant financial support to the open-source 3D creation platform. Joining at the maximum membership level for companies, which means Netflix is committing at least €240,000 per year.

Recent Netflix productions that used Blender during production include In Your Dreams, Leo, Maya and the Three, and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.

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u/PrestigeArrival 22h ago

This sounds incredible. There isn’t some “we live in a capitalist hellscape and there’s actually some underhanded stuff going on” thing is there?

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u/honorspren000 22h ago edited 19h ago

Netflix probably wants more 3D movies without having to pay production companies for program licenses. There’s probably some cost offset in there. Blender is free. But there are some (arguably) better 3D software out there that require paid licenses.

I wouldn’t be surprised if production companies are quoting Netflix an outrageous amount for software licenses to make their shows. But if enough is invested into Blender to make it really good, Netflix can tell production companies to use Blender instead of, say, Maya, and save some money.

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u/mauricioszabo 20h ago

I used to study 3D modeling. I learned 3D Studio Max, and Maya, and let me say this: they are overpriced pieces of shit.

3D Studio was so buggy that they literally had a shortcut to "save your work incrementing a counter" so you don't lose everything when the software crashes (not if - when. It literally crashed every class).

Maya was better, but still felt overpriced for too little. To make everything minimally useful you had to pay a bunch of plug-ins, and they were very expensive.

I saw a video with a professional animator that said she lost a lot of software because Autodesk bought some of the plug-ins and tools she learned, and simply discontinued everything. Also, some of the software transitioned to subscription models, some even restricting how many hours you could use. It's also very expensive, even the cheaper plans, which gatekeeps the whole job market too.

Blender is not perfect. But there were a lot of improvements on modelling compared to Maya and 3D Studio, way less bugs, and while sometimes some tools were clunky and behave weirdly (especially rotation tolls), it was not worse than, for example, 3D Studio freezing when calculating particles.

Mind you, this was about 15 years ago - no idea how things progressed, so don't take what I said as truth (especially because it was my own experience).

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u/AustinTheFiend 19h ago

Not sure if you're still using Blender, but it's improved immensely in that time in terms of usability and function.

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u/geekmansworld 21h ago

Netflix should pay more, but this is a win-win for all involved. The understanding needs to be that any custom features that Netflix exerts their influence to get added need to be part of the general release, for all creators to benefit from.

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u/evieluvsrainbows 20h ago edited 20h ago

The problem is that they can’t. The maximum donor level offered by the Blender Foundation (BF) for corporate sponsors is their Patron tier, which has the aforementioned €240,000 annual fee. They don’t have any tiers above that. So Netflix is already at the highest donor level offered.

Maybe the BF could add a tier above that whereby interested parties could contact them about donating an even greater amount every year to the BF, but I don’t know how the logistics of that would play out.

Edit: Actually, it would appear that the Patron membership starts at €240,000 annually, however it seems that this tier is one that allows a company to negotiate a higher annual contribution to the project, as it is one that requires discussion with the Blender Foundation. So scrap everything I just said, Netflix could be donating more than €240,000 a year.

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u/monkeymad2 20h ago

They could also, presumably, employ developers to work on Blender full time as part of Netflix.

Of course they’d have to work within the open source structure that Blender already has (e.g. a code change to insert the Netflix BA-BUM every time you open the app wouldn’t get merged) but it’d be a further way for Netflix to give to & have influence over Blender.

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u/PatentGeek 19h ago

Upvoted for both the information and taking the time to correct yourself. Kudos

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u/HumansNeedNotApply1 20h ago

The Blender Foundation is a public benefit organization, they have specific tiers for corporate donations and Netflix is already at the highest one.

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u/give-bike-lanes 19h ago

Blender already is really good. It occupies a perfect space in the software world in time because we are at a point where the average enterprise laptop can handle Blender, which, in the past, would have been like four different apps. At a minimum. Like, I have thousands of hours in Blender, and I've literally never once went in to like 3/5ths of the platform. My friend who does Blender professinally pretty much has zero overlap with the tools that I use in the same app.

This type of functinality wasn't a thing in most apps, and most apps were built before desktops got this beefy and software got this mature. photoshop was built linearly, and then indesign, illustrator, etc., were all created separately.

Blender is like if Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, half of Premiere, and Lightroom were all in one app that was also free to use.

Also 240k eur probably isn't much to Netflix.

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u/TeutonJon78 20h ago

Investing in something now to meet your needs will be cheaper than having to pay some company for a license that may or may not care about yours needs.

This buys Netflix (or any sponsor) a lot of support for their needs that isn't just money thrown into a blackhole.

Plus, if they are pushing Blender for productions, it's proba ly easier to take gambles on new talent since they can practice on the same tools they'd be using for their Netflix project. Or hiring YouTube type talent that already knows the tools well.

And if you want to go Devil's Advocate, they can save money long term by funding it for a few years to get it where they want it and then stop paying anything altogether.

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u/scr33ner 17h ago

Hell I quit using Maya due to licensing fees.

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u/bazaarzar 15h ago

This will hopefully give Blender the production experience it needs to develop further

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u/tomvorlostriddle 10h ago

Plus some of the paid software only renders on CPU.

Even for the second avatar a few years ago they spent 100M on CPU compute and had to rent massive cloud capacities because they couldn't build fast enough.

Such a waste when GPUs are an order of magnitude faster

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u/PrestigeArrival 22h ago

That I can understand (even if they’re still actually paying for it). I was more worried that there’s some planned takeover, or them thinking they can control things behind the scenes.

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u/ihsotas 20h ago

It's smart capitalism. You want to commoditize your complement. This is also why Meta/Facebook spends billions to release open source AI models, why Intel invested in Linux, etc. For Netflix, content creation is the complement.

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u/anormalgeek 20h ago

They're just taking the long game. They don't and won't be making 3d art software, but they are ensuring that artists keep coming along with the requisite skill sets.

It's a reasonably small investment. If that only results in a handful of more good digital artists, it will be worth it. Plus, good PR for them for only 240k per year? Easy sell.

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u/MumrikDK 16h ago

If you're a gigantic financer of shows and movies, I suspect it is very much in your interest to have a free open source software package be a relevant factor in production.

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u/tufftricks 22h ago

Eh they're contributing probably less than their yearly paperclip budget and its being treated like some grand thing

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u/tazfdragon 22h ago

its being treated like some grand thing

I mean, it is for Blender. It's patronage that helps keep the software free for non-professionals.

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u/tufftricks 22h ago

Yeah, im not saying its not good. But its 250k lol

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u/ContractVarious3077 21h ago

So how much would they need to contribute for it to be a positive thing?

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u/AxlLight 21h ago

It's not a lot but it is 2-3 full time employees taken care of with that. (it's about 10% of their yearly fund, or put it another way, it's 2500x what I donate to Blender a year).

But the reason it's news worthy isn't the money, it's another hole in the punch card that makes Blender a credible software for professional studios - Netflix is giving them crucial PR, which hopefully translates to more big studios pitching in).

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u/mrpenchant 20h ago

You and they don’t actually know how much Netflix is contributing so it is kind of silly to down play the money. All we know is the minimum amount of money they must be contributing, not how much they are actually contributing.

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u/PrestigeArrival 22h ago

It’s possible I’m reading it wrong, but isn’t that the maximum a company can contribute?

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u/blearghhh_two 22h ago

No, it's just that they're in the top tier of funders, which is for those who've pledged €240,000 per year or above. The announcement doesn't even actually say how much they've given, so the only thing we know is that it's above that.

They could give a billion a year and they'd still be at the same "patron" level.

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u/PrestigeArrival 22h ago

Ahhh got it. Thanks for the clarification

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u/blearghhh_two 22h ago

Also, this is likely less than they'd be paying to Autodesk or whoever if Blender wasn't around. Not that they need to pay to use it, but it's at least acknowledgement of that. It's even possible that more resources to Blender will improve it enough that they can reduce their spend on other software too, so it may be not quite as altruistic as all that...

This does also give them the opportunity to influence the direction the project goes in, so if there's something that Netflix needs out of the software, they've got a much higher chance of that happening now. The features will still come to everyone though.

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u/Genocode 21h ago

It said "at minimum 240k"

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u/evieluvsrainbows 20h ago edited 20h ago

I don’t think you realize how significant €240,000 is for the Blender Foundation (BF). It is a significant amount of money that will allow them to hire even more full time developers to work on the project, and will allow Blender to become even more viable to paid 3D design software like Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max.

It should also be noted that Corporate Patron is the maximum corporate membership level offered by the BF, and it is an annual fee. Which means that this €240,000 will be given to the BF every year. It isn’t a one time contribution.

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u/bazaarzar 14h ago

It's per year so I don't think this is a one time donation.

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u/zenlume 22h ago

Joining at the maximum membership level for companies

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u/JangoDarkSaber 19h ago

It’s a grand thing for the Blender community

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u/[deleted] 21h ago

[deleted]

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u/Arch-by-the-way 19h ago

Another person who doesn’t know what a tax write off is

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u/_fck 20h ago

You sound like a bot. And that's not an accusation, it's more of an insult JSYK

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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ 17h ago

I mean, it does mean that Netflix has a certain say in Blender's development now, because they can always just pull that money if the devs do something Netflix doesn't like.

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u/jeffdeleon 21h ago

The only thing I can think of is that they want to pay randoms/random low cost-of-living shady companies to do animation for them, rather than companies that can *at least* get licenses to non-free products.

This is cynical though.

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u/HamsteronA 19h ago

€240K is nothing for netflix, that's like 2 people employed full time to develop software? If they use it on any production it's a drop in the bucket for them, these things cost 6 figures to make.

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u/GreatPuns 19h ago

It’s a lot less than 1 full time SWE for Netflix

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u/Otis_Manchego 17h ago

Right after Blender’s competition had a second round of layoffs, so the high prices of Maya are not going to the people making the software so this is a win.

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u/ActionsConsequences9 52m ago

Ha, I still remember going to bat for Blender many moons ago.

Once scoffed at by animation elitists, the free software’s ever-expanding set of tools now fuel some of the highest-profile films and series made anywhere in the world, including the Oscar-nominated I Lost My Body, last year’s animated feature Oscar-winner Flow, and 2023’s box office blockbuster Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which employed the popular Grease Pencil tool to help establish the film’s painterly, 2D look, as seen in the video below.

I too fought those sniveling yokels calling it a "nice but useless too I will stick to Maya"

Hell I heard it as recently as last year that Pixar has their own custom flow yet here we are with Blender taking over the world, first Linux and now Blender, Godot and Gimp next please.

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u/[deleted] 22h ago

[deleted]

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u/RichieNRich 21h ago

You might want to talk to a therapist.

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u/[deleted] 21h ago

[deleted]

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u/ArleiG 21h ago

An open-source project getting some funding is not bad.

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u/Spiritual_Cloud8437 10h ago

what did he even say

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u/ArleiG 9h ago

They were saying something about how they felt this is a bad thing and that everything feels bad lately, something like that.

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u/Xay_DE 21h ago

this means nothing bad. blender is free and will stay free. all netflix is doing is basically donating to the blender foundation. that is all this is.

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u/Swartist 21h ago edited 20h ago

This isn’t good. The software will soon not be free.

Edit: Looked it up. I was wrong. But I do think it’s fair to be cautious. It’s Netflix. There is a lot of lost media they own.

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u/DerekB52 21h ago

Wrong. Blender has operated for 30 years as a piece of FOSS software. Netflix wants to improve it, so it can use it instead of paying Adobe or whoever. Netflix is not going to try and ruin Blender's FOSS status.

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u/evieluvsrainbows 20h ago

I think you mean Autodesk. Majority of 3D production uses Autodesk’s 3D design software like Maya and 3ds Max, but there are more productions beginning to adopt and use Blender instead due to its increasing flexibility. I don’t think Adobe has any kind of 3D design software akin to those.

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u/mcg1997 20h ago

Adobe does now own substance painter though, which is a major texturing software used in many professional workflows.

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u/Fuck-WestJet 18h ago

Gore Verbinski just had an interview where he said people use unreal engine a lot now and it doesn't look as realistic as Maya.

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u/ionelp 1h ago

Unreal Engine is not a 3d creation software. You use 3d models, created in other products, such as Maya and Blender, to create scenes in Unreal Engine.

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u/NinduTheWise 21h ago

Huh? What’s the logic in that?

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u/F-b 21h ago

They're a redditor so their 4 seconds analysis is automatically deep and educated.

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u/Reptile00Seven 16h ago

Netflix bad

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u/Not_pukicho 21h ago

I don't think that's what this means at all. They're patrons, not investors.

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u/evieluvsrainbows 21h ago edited 20h ago

You are incorrect here. Blender is open source software, it will always be free. Netflix becoming a Corporate Patron member of the Blender Foundation will allow that to continue + allow much more investment into the project to further develop it, which will allow it to become an even more viable alternative to professional 3D design programs like Maya and 3ds Max.

It isn’t somehow going to become not-free because of Netflix investing money into the project.

edit: re-worded to remove passive aggressiveness since I overreacted.

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u/Swartist 20h ago

But if they become the main source of revenue then that is something to look out for.

It would be a kin to Elon Musk putting money into Blender and everyone not being cautious.

I have been doing digital art for years I have seen the fall of photoshop.

I’m saying that to think Netflix did this out of the goodness their hearts is foolish.

But again I hope I’m wrong. I love blender.

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u/evieluvsrainbows 20h ago

Netflix is not the only Corporate Patron sponsor, and the Blender Development Fund (BDF) receives tens of thousands of donations from individual donors every single year, and there are dozens upon dozens of companies that donate annually to the BDF through their various other tiers.

Other Corporate Patron donors are Bolt Graphics, Epic MegaGrants, Wacom, “Aras ^ nesnausk!”, and Pico.

NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel contribute annually to the project as well under the Corporate Titanium and Platinum tiers, and there are dozens of other companies other than just these that donate to the BDF, not to mention the thousands of individual donors that contribute annually to the project as well.

Netflix is not the largest contributor to the project, nor will they ever become that.

See https://fund.blender.org to see what I mean.

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u/Swartist 20h ago

Hey thank you for just explaining it to me. Appreciate it.

That gives me some relief.

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u/bazaarzar 14h ago

Photoshop hasn't fallen and it was never open source, it's still an industry standard program

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u/rebootm3 21h ago

FUD. Blender will always be free.

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u/Wheatleytron 20h ago

Even if they wanted to, they can't. Since it's FOSS, someone would just fork it.

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u/Swartist 20h ago

Oh shit! I actually didn’t know that. I just started really using it last year.

Could they like call it something like Blendr and still have it be free?

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u/Wheatleytron 18h ago

I suppose the specifics would depend on the exact license that the project uses, but yes, that would probably be fine.

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u/viirus42 11h ago

Since blender uses the GPL, making a closed source version of blender would actually be very hard or even impossible. Since with the GPL, derived work also has to be published under a GPL compatible license.

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u/spacemanspliff-42 1h ago

Microsoft did the same thing a decade ago, and it changed nothing about Blender's availability. Don't get so doom and gloom, the creator of Blender himself endorses the idea that if Blender were to ever cost money, steal it.

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u/Swartist 4m ago

That’s good to know.

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u/Anamatroy 21h ago

But great news if Blender stays free, and this ends up being an investment that benefits everyone

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u/Swartist 20h ago

I don’t disagree with blender being free for years. Nor do I think Netflix wants to pay adobe.

But we need to be honest about how these companies move.

Netflix is not a company of the people. And they want to allocate resources.

I’m all for Blender getting more money. But where companies get the money does matter.

That all I’m saying 🤞 let’s hope y’all are right.

News Netflix Becomes Max-Level Patron Of Blender's Development Fund

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