The Open 3D Foundation Welcomes Epic Games as a Premier Member to Unleash the Creativity of Artists Everywhere

Interoperability and portability of real-time 3D assets and tools deliver unparalleled flexibility, as the Open 3D community celebrates its first birthday

SAN FRANCISCO – July 20, 2022 – The Open 3D Foundation (O3DF) is proud to announce Epic Games as a Premier member alongside Adobe, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Huawei, Intel, LightSpeed Studios, Microsoft and Niantic, as it celebrates its first birthday.

With today’s world racing faster and faster towards 3D technologies, the O3DF provides a home for artists, content creators, developers and technology leaders to congregate and collaborate, share best practices and shape the future of open 3D development. This thriving community is focused on making it easier to use and share 3D assets with its partners and the Open 3D Engine (O3DE), the first high-fidelity, fully-featured, real-time, open-source 3D engine, available to every industry.

Epic Games, developer of Unreal Engine, joins the O3DF as a Premier member to further interoperability and portability of assets, visuals and media scripting, enabling artists and content creators around the globe to unleash their creativity and innovation by removing barriers in their choice of tools. Marc Petit, VP of Unreal Engine Ecosystem at Epic Games, will join the O3DF’s Governing Board. In this role, he will share what Epic has learned over 30 years in the industry to help shape the Foundation’s strategic direction and curation of 3D visualization and simulation projects.

“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,” said Petit. “With shared standards for interoperability, we’re giving creators more freedom and flexibility to build interactive 3D content using the tools they’re most comfortable with, and to bring those amazing experiences to life in Unreal Engine and across other 3D engines.” 

This move builds on Epic Games’ steadfast commitment in delivering choice to content producers to unleash their creativity. In addition to enabling them to move media seamlessly between development environments, the Open 3D Engine allows artists and developers to consume only what they need, with the ability to customize components based on their unique requirements.

“We applaud Epic Game’s commitment to the open-source community and welcome them into the Open 3D Foundation as our newest Premier member, underscoring our mission in championing the deep integration of open source with commercial solutions to accelerate growth in a sustainable, balanced ecosystem that fuels the flywheel of success and innovation,” 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 around the globe, providing them with best-of-breed tools.”

Celebrating Its First Birthday

The Foundation and its anchor project, O3DE, celebrate their first birthday as they welcome Epic Games into this quickly growing community. Since the Foundation’s public announcement in July 2021, over 25 member companies have joined. Other Premier members include Adobe, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, LightSpeed Studios and Niantic.

In May, O3DE announced its latest release, focused on performance, stability and usability enhancements. With over 1,460 code merges, this new release offers several improvements aimed to make it easier to build 3D simulations for AAA games and a range of other applications. Significant enhancements include core stability, installer validation, motion matching, user-defined property (UDP) support for the asset pipeline, and automated testing advancements. The O3D Engine community is very active, averaging up to two million line changes and 350-450 commits monthly from 60-100 authors across 41 repos.

Join Us at O3DCon

On October 17-19, the Open 3D Foundation will host O3Dcon, its flagship conference, bringing together technology leaders, indie developers, and academia to share ideas and best practices, discuss hot topics and foster the future of 3D development across a variety of industries and disciplines. For those interested in sponsoring this event, please contact sponsorships@linuxfoundation.org. 

Anyone interested in the O3D Engine is invited to get involved and connect with the community on Discord.com/invite/o3de and GitHub.com/o3de. 

About the Open 3D Engine (O3DE) project

O3D Engine is the flagship project managed by the Open 3D (O3D) Foundation. The open-source project is a modular, cross-platform 3D engine built to power anything from AAA games to cinema-quality 3D worlds to high-fidelity simulations. The code is hosted on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. To learn more, please visit o3de.org.

About the Open 3D Foundation

Established in July 2021, the mission of the Open 3D Foundation (O3DF) is to make an open-source, fully-featured, high-fidelity, real-time 3D engine for building games and simulations, available to every industry. The Open 3D Foundation is home to the O3D Engine project. To learn more, please visit o3d.foundation.

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

Media Inquiries:

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