Many of us at the content team at Embark use Blender daily, and our long-term ambition at the studio is to use Blender as our default program for 3D and environment art.

Apart from supporting Blender’s development as a sponsor, we’re also going to share some of the Blender tools we have developed on our open-source portal, so stay tuned for that!

In case you haven’t heard of Blender, it’s a free and open-source 3D creation program, that lets you do pretty much anything related to your 3D pipeline. You can download it here.

We use Blender because it’s a great piece of software. It’s fast and reliable, and its community makes it better every day. We’re also fans of how Blender is making game development more accessible and collaborative, something that is right in line with our own long-term mission.

For too long our industry has been walled-off, with expensive software licenses posing a barrier for non-professionals to even get started. All that is beginning to change now, and Blender is a great example of what happens when powerful software is made available for everyone to use, and communities start to work together to change the status quo.

Below are some thoughts from two people at Embark’s content team, Robert Berg and Maxi Vazquez, who have used Blender daily for the past months. They’ll provide some more insight into how we use Blender at Embark, and what’s so great about it from an artist’s perspective.