It was a strong year for Best Animated Feature Oscar nominations, and an underdog triumphed. At the 97th annual Academy Awards at Ovation Hollywood in Los Angeles last night, Flow beat competition from Pixar’s Inside Out 2, DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot and Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.
Gints Zilbalodis tale about a cat in a flooded world missed out on the Oscar for Best International Feature Film but still became Latvia’s first Oscar win. And it was surely also the first Oscar winner to be made entirely in the free 3D modelling software Blender, cementing the open-source program’s place among the best animation software.
Flow was one of our highlights of Annecy 2024, and it still seems incredible that it was made by a small team using Blender alone. It was rendered in EEVEE, Blender’s realtime render engine.
Gints thanked Blender when accepting the award. Speaking to press afterwards, he said: "Any kid now has tools that are used to make now Academy Award-winning films, so I think we’re going to see all kinds of exciting films being made from kids who might not have had a chance to do this before.
Reminder that Blender is struggling with funding right now. https://topicroomsvfx.com/news/the-price-of-free-blenders-funding-crisis/
Make sure to leave it a few bucks if you use it. https://fund.blender.org/
I didn’t hear they’re struggling? Its not like they can get more money and instantly increase the scope and just toss stuff on, people compare them to for profit companies who need to make a profit for investors, the amount of money they have would obv be less
Like they wont shut down anytime soon, but more miney will definitely lead to more features. Personally want to see simulation improvements, its just so poor compared to embergen/houdini.
Hopefully Deep Funding becomes popular enough that it no longer becomes a problem
Whenever I download a new version of Blender I typically throw them $10 - $15.
Just like with other open source software I use, I give it a shot and if I like it I’ll throw them $10 - $15 each time I update.
Edit: It’s not much but it’s not nothing. No raindrop feels reasonable for the flood and all that.
That’s more than I can afford to be donating right now
More than 99% of users including me
For each update? I’d be the one with funding issues if I’d do that :D
Each time I update
So in general that’s each time there’s a new LTS version I want to update to. I don’t so the nightlies or daily branches for most of my software and the ones that I do I basically throw some cash like each quarter or so depending on how much I use their software.
Blender for example I think put about $100 towards it last year, that was only the second year I was able to support them and the first year (4 years ago) I only put $15 towards them. And Blender got the most I put towards a project last year.
This year I’ve already put $30 towards Godot though. It’s ahead of Blender right now in 2025.
I try to do what I can, sometimes I can’t contribute and sometimes I can. I like to help where and when I can.
Unfortunately I may have to hold off for a few months as I just got a suprise bill for $1800 so it may be October (hopefully) when I can throw some cash their way again.
I also contribute to some content creators I enjoy, though not as many as I’d like.
That’s why they do it. A lot of people can’t afford to donate to software, so for those who can, it’s nice to make a sizeable contribution.
Going into debt running Tumbleweed.
If you pay per package, you get shaken down whenever GCC is updated.
Sweats in Arch
thank you for your support to FOSS!
You do a lot, and thank you!
I also hope the studios behind the film made sure to pay a solid donation.