I hope this isn’t violating some forum rule: if so, sorry, and a mod can delete it.
I have no association at all with Blender except as a user of it, but I think a lot of us are using it to create game content, and it’s a very powerful tool provided absolutely for free to the worldwide community. In fact, if you’re on Linux it comes right with your operating system!
It’s totally optional to donate to their foundation, but if you use it and want to help them out to keep providing good open source stuff, I think it’s a nice thing to shoot them a couple dollars/euros/yen/rubles. Even if you can only afford a small amount, I think they appreciate that, since most people will never give them anything.
If in a few years of work I can ever get a game to a saleable state, I plan to donate a % of the profits to the free tools like Blender in addition to the UE4 license %. Good to give back, I figure.
Cool, breese45. Glad to hear there’s work happening on the asset pipeline from blender to UE4 - it surely has some rough edges at the moment. Edit in fact I’ve considered trying to contribute to it myself, though I’d have to learn how it works first. If I did, I’d try to add in LODs-in-FBX-file support somehow, to avoid all the fiddling about that’s required now on importing multiple LODs.
Blender’s not installed by default, as far as I know, on any of them. But, it is in every distro’s repos that I’ve ever used, but I’d personally recommend just getting it from the the official website. The distro versions tend to lag a bit behind. Blender is also available through Steam now, which is currently how I have it installed (mainly for the auto-updating).
Hi Franktech - I’m not sure it’s installed by default, but it is in the OS repos so you can fetch it like you can fetch any of the other OS software. Debian based OSs can do something like “apt-get install blender”, or the same using one of the GUI package managers.