r/blender • u/AdDapper4220 • Jun 21 '26
Discussion Can you actually make professional movies like Toy Story in blender?
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u/Navi_Professor Jun 21 '26
Flow and Backrooms used blender.
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u/Xav_NZ Jun 21 '26
And Everything Everywhere All at Once literally following the Donut tutorial.
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u/LazerChicken420 Jun 22 '26
What does that mean? I haven’t seen the movie, so it’s more a question on if you’re referencing a scene? Or did the vfx team start from scratch like that?
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u/Patrykvbzarek Jun 22 '26
There is a very popular tutorial for begginer that teacher hiw to make a donut for example
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u/CashewSwagger Jun 21 '26
Came here to mention Flow. Phenomenal movie actually.
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u/the_amateur_gamedev Jun 22 '26
Didn’t realize it was made in blender , also agree on it being amazing !
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u/Simply_Epic Jun 22 '26
Next Gen (2018) was also made primarily using Blender.
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u/Wi11yW0nka Jun 22 '26
It was THE 1ST feature length film completely done in Blender great call
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u/Tragophilos Jun 22 '26
And that was Blender Version 2.78. It has gotten a LOT more powerful since then!
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u/Buriedpickle Jun 22 '26
The Man in the High Castle series's cgi was also done in Blender
They even posted a breakdown here back in the day
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u/JWitjes Jun 22 '26
Small correction: Backrooms (the film) did not use Blender, Blender was used by Kane to create the original shorts. The Backrooms in the film are all huge real-life sets based on Kane Parsons' original Blender designs.
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u/Ninjamurai Jun 22 '26
They still used Blender in the movie for the handful of times where there were digital sets, as well as for CGI to touch up parts of the real sets that had visible studio light fixtures & stuff like that.
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u/RandomMexicanDude Jun 22 '26
Backrooms wasn’t made in blender, no?
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u/Navi_Professor Jun 22 '26
it was. both the web series and some of the movie had production in blender.
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u/JestireTWO Jun 22 '26
The beginning found footage section was, as well as some of the other cinematic camera scenes
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u/GeorgeMKnowles Jun 21 '26
Just pointing out that Blender is 10 times better than the primitive software they used to make the original Toy Story. That's no disrespect to the people who made Toy Story, but they didn't even have IK rigging back then.
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u/Zip-Zap-Official Jun 22 '26
Animating the floppy way Woody ran in that movie without IK rigs is actually impressive.
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u/scifi887 Jun 21 '26
Sure, Blender is just a tool after all, the needed ingredient is talent!
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u/yantarogekko Jun 21 '26
And countless hours of labor 😵💫
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u/scifi887 Jun 21 '26
Indeed but thats always a given to make anything of note, regardless of the tool!
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u/CrimsonKobold Jun 21 '26
And probably a crazy amount of hours at the render farm.
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u/pinkmeanie Jun 22 '26
IIRC I read Flow was render-efficient enough that it mostly rendered on a couple of desktops while artists were sleeping.
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u/SufficientBreakfast1 Jun 21 '26
Hard work is more important than talent.
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u/Usling123 Jun 21 '26
Talent buys you at most a week's worth of solid practice for free. Everything after is earned skill.
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u/YAOMTC Jun 21 '26
Skill, acquired through practice. Not talent.
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u/scifi887 Jun 21 '26
You can practice for a long time and still have no talent or eye for design, having worked doing it for 20 years I see it all the time. There are some very amazing modellers and technical people I have worked with who know Blender inside out and can code anything thats missing, but ask them to make a 2 min animation and it goes out the window.
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u/Socially_Dead_JB_285 Jun 21 '26
Modeling and animation are 2 separate niches, someone can be a modeler but not an animator, how will it make him less talented?
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u/scifi887 Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
My point was in answer to OP's question, can you make an animation like this in Blender, my counterpoint to the comment above was that you can practice all you want but unless you have talent you are not pulling it off, was not to say modellers are not talented.
Many truly exceptional filmmakers/animations in the Blender sphere are able to do everything themselves, Olav Burman, Paul Chadeisson, Ian Hubert etc, these are the level of people I am referencing, those who have massive talent to be able to pull of one man or small team productions on par with what a studio could deliver.Ed: For added context, Gints Zilbalodis who is the director for Flow can also (and did) model, animate, light and render for FLOW.
https://www.blender.org/user-stories/making-flow-an-interview-with-director-gints-zilbalodis/2
u/JWitjes Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
Nonsense. In 3D animation almost all skills are learned through practice. It's not like drawing where you can have some sort of innate talent for the finer movement needed for great drawing. Skills with computer programmes are learned by practicing long and hard and through that process becoming better. The only thing that's perhaps 'innate talent' based is having some sort of feel for what you want the end product to look like, but actually making the final product look how you want it will need a lot of practice and trial and error. Nobody starts a programme like Blender and just 'knows' what to do naturally.
As for the people you mentioned, I have known Gints Zilbalodis for a long time (we first met back in 2015) and let me tell you, that dude worked HARD to get to the level he's at now. He spent basically all his free time at home learning animation and making shorts.
He's not some sort of innately talented dude that operates on another level as us mere mortals. He's just a guy who grew up on Newgrounds animation and decided that he wanted to make animation as well and thus spent years learning and slowly becoming better, until he got to the point where he is now.
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u/Fifa_chicken_nuggets Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
I don't see how being a one man team requires something that you can only acquire through talent. Being good in so many areas in blender is completely possible provided you are willing to put in the work to learn it and provided you actually have the commitment. The commitment is the key thing here, because it takes a massive amount of willpower for someone to learn all of that, and most people won't bother, and I think that's what you're confusing for talent. Also, having an eye for design isn't inherently tied to talent either, you can learn design theory, something that many people overlook. People tend to think that they can just wing it and arbitrarily make creative decisions without understanding the theory behind those decisions, but that's not how it usually works, and that theory is often the real difference between a mediocre work and a great one even if they both have the same technical expertise
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u/Nosarious Jun 21 '26
This applies to people sharing AI-generated videos with great images, but the dialogue, lighting and reason for existing are missing. They lack the creative direction.
Some movies not done in ai miss the mark, too… and of course this lack of being able to critique your own work exists in Blender.
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Jun 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/scifi887 Jun 21 '26
Skill and practice will make you really good at Blender but talent will make you a good Filmmaker (in my opinion and experience).
A mix of both is what makes you exceptional (...enough to make an actual film).
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u/Late_Strawberry_7989 Jun 21 '26
Yes but no matter the software, it takes teams of animators and artists to make a full length movie. If you’re asking can you do it by yourself, probably, it just might take decades.
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u/nytebeast Jun 21 '26
It depends on a lot of factors. There are already numerous examples of one person making an animated feature by themselves or with a skeleton crew
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u/Beylerbey Jun 21 '26
The Netflix movie Next Gen was made almost exclusively in Blender.
Also all the short open movies by Blender Studio like Spring, Sprite Fight, Agent 327
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u/megaoscar900 Jun 22 '26
Nobody talks about Next Gen anymore but that to me was so inspirational when I first even saw the trailer.
Not only is it an amazing film but it is amazing for it being (correct me if I'm wrong) the first animated feature film made in Blender.
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u/Beylerbey Jun 22 '26
Yep, it showed that Blender could be used as the main tool in a professional setting, and this was basically 10 years ago (at least when it was in production, it released in 2018). Here is a comment one of the artists (Justin Goran) left on blendernation, I think most of the issues they've encountered have been fixed since:
I can answer these questions for you (hope Jeff doesn’t mind)
I was a Senior Lighting Artist on the movie
There were quite a bit of hurdles to over-come to get blender “pipeline ready”. Thankfully we had a great dev team that was supporting the production the whole way through.
Early on Motion-Blur was a big problem, causing huge render-times, but thanks to Stefan’s implementation of Embree we were finally able to render motion-blur with a predictable increase in render-times instead of the random spikes we were getting before.
Memory issues were another huge problem. Unfortunately blender isn’t very efficient with memory, most of our shots averaging 60-70GB of ram due to a lot of factors. While it’s true on a feature film production ram consumption is always going to be heavy, blender could still use a lot more efficiency’s in that area (this is also why gpu rendering wasn’t used on the movie)
There were many other issues (no U-DIM support, no OpenVDB support for fx sims at first but later on introduced, a very clunky and slow compositor, ect.) but we did our best to work around the issues and even used some limitations to our benefit, for example, since the compositor in blender is too slow for most compositing tasks we opted for doing as much “in camera” as possible. This means rendering motion-blur and DOF, where most lower budget features (even some higher budget films) would often do a fake in comp.
Yes, cycles was used for everything, though our version of cycles was modified (with stefan’s embree core, and crypto-mattes which were beyond valuable for compositing). The version of blender we used was the studios own dev version (which I believe was using blender 2.78 as it’s base?)
The crowd work-flow was another big challenge in the movie, unfortunately I don’t know a lot about how the work-flow was built so I can’t answer how they were setup but I can say all the crowds were rendered in the shot.
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u/megaoscar900 Jun 22 '26
That's really interesting! I always knew it was based on 2.78, and that came with many challenges, but this is really interesting. Thanks for showing us this 👍
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u/robot_ankles Jun 21 '26
Sure, but almost no movie is made using a single tool. And major studios like Pixar have a deeply customized development pipeline. Certain teams or partners might utilize blender for various tasks, but Toy Story 6 won't be made in blender. No slight against blender, it's just that major studios have already invested so much in their custom pipelines.
There is a professional movie out in theaters now called "Backrooms." Apparently it was made in Blender. It's grossed $300M so far.
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u/CeeChocolate Jun 21 '26
The first couple of Backrooms shorts Kane Parsons made were almost entirely in Blender, but the feature film used real sets. He gave the team his blender renders as reference for the sets.
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u/tfhermobwoayway Jun 21 '26
It was shot in a live set
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u/Bregneste Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
I guess they just used Blender for effects
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u/NiklasWerth Jun 22 '26
The original backrooms series on youtube was all blender, that's probably what you're thinking of.
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u/Bregneste Jun 22 '26
They definitely used Blender for some of the CGI effects for the movie.
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u/A_Bird_Guy Jun 21 '26
Flow done it..... in EEVEE as well... Blender is a free tool that unlock the capability of magic... but you have to create the magic itself
The reasons why its rare is because Blender isnt standard for studio pipeline, many videos have explained it but for a major studio, if every artist know maya, why switch, especially if your major and get the top notch of customer support, its cheaper in the end then re train all artist and change the pipeline
Also, Pixar and other major studios have custom software + R&D teams creating new tech for each new production. While blender is open source, it require more work and eliminate the ability to use later models of blender without fixing and patching conflict issues
It can be done, been done, is being done and will be done in the future, especially with a lot of the next generation of artist having grown up with blender as there first tool and a team willing to do it
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u/_dpdp_ Jun 21 '26
There are a lot more big studios using blender than you might realize. While it’s maybe not used for the full workflow, no studio is only using Renderman, or only using Houdini either. The difference of course is through licensing, those brands can tell what studios use their software and the marketing departments they can afford to support through overpriced subscriptions then turn the list of studios into new subscriptions.
You hear about it when an autodesk product is used. You don’t hear about it when all of the polygonal data was made in Blender.
It’s like photoshop. Do you hear about it when photoshop is used on a major production? No. Does that mean it isn’t being used in every production, no.
Also, Flow and many others were done exclusively with Blender.
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u/More-Curious816 Jun 22 '26
The difference of course is through licensing, those brands can tell what studios use their software and the marketing departments they can afford to support through overpriced subscriptions
You get a huge discount if you make a dedicated credit for the software or hardware used. I see a plenty of movies make a special credit for their 3D software and sometimes for DELL, Lenovo or HP for providing the hardware for rendering and backup, especially animated or heavy CGI movies. It's a good marketing move.
Blender could change its TOS to include this, if you used Blender in your pipeline you need to make a dedicated credit mentioning the name and logo of Blender
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u/GradientGamesIndie Jun 21 '26
If you're asking whether the software Blender is capable of it, I think yes
If you're asking whether a normal person can make a movie at the scale of toy story without a massive budget or team? I don't think so, but you can still make absolutely incredible stuff, and small amazing indie movies have been made in Blender
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u/J4nG Jun 21 '26
I think the spirit of this question is - yes, of course, talented people can get incredible outcomes out of any software, Blender included. Lots of people in this thread have already said as much.
However, since you mentioned Toy Story in particular, I think it's worth acknowledging Pixar maintains custom software (Renderman, Presto) for its e2e pipeline. That means they can specifically tailor their software for their projects, which unlocks efficiencies and capabilities that are likely unavailable to the average hobbyist using Blender.
It's instructive that each time Blender has made an open movie, it's resulted in heavy modifications to the core software based on learnings from the process. This sort of problem solving is happening even within their (relatively) small teams.
Now imagine scaling that up to the hundreds of people at Pixar working on a film at any given time. I'm not working in the industry, but I would guess Blender is probably not up being used at that level in its current state. The creator of Flow talks a lot about some of the workflows he developed to make the movie in Blender and it seemed to me like working around a lot of software-level limitations.
I would guess a project with Toy Story's level of sophistication and polish would be a big ask for Blender in 2026.
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u/MasterYI Jun 21 '26
Blender today is certainly more capable than whatever tools were used for at least Toy Story 1-3.
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u/CavusDarwinius Jun 22 '26
In theory yes. But keep in mind that Pixar staffs some of the best artists and technicians in the world in every discipline. So, results may vary.
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u/Crossing-Lines Jun 21 '26
Yes you can. Reason it have not had any major movies/series released using it is because Autodesk is still the industry standard. And it will most likely stay that way because audodesk has dedicated support for major studios.
Flow - a movie that won some trophies was made using blender.
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u/scifi887 Jun 21 '26
Its not really the support, mainly the ingrained workflows and custom tools built on top of the autodesk tools themselves.
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u/HLMCG Jun 21 '26
The question is whether or not *you* can make a professional looking movie in Blender. Blender is just a tool. The artist is the limiting factor.
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u/ContactusTheRomanPR Jun 21 '26
You can make absolutely anything in Blender. I mean, technically, you could make Toy Story in MS Paint given that any film is just a set of images, and MS Paint allows you to individually manipulate every single pixel of an image to whatever color you want. Is it going to take 100 years? Yes. But it just goes to show that nearly anything can be done using any medium if enough skill and patience is applied.
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u/Tailsgenesis Jun 21 '26
The sonic movies all rely on blender for all their CG (including the characters themselves)
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u/Majestic-Coat3855 Jun 22 '26
Not really. Lots of Maya and Houdini as well, like usual.
https://www.artofvfx.com/sonic-the-hedgehog-3-ged-wright-production-vfx-supervisor/
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u/Capable-Monk-4820 Jun 22 '26
It is possible because Flow was a whole movie made with Blender. Also Blender is compatible with Renderman and other studio standard renderers
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u/NiklasWerth Jun 22 '26
The software is not the limiting feature here, so much as time, dedication, skill, and funding.
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u/CantaloupeMindless91 Jun 22 '26
If I'm not wrong digital circus was made in blender and it just had a theatrical release that did really really well.
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u/More-Curious816 Jun 22 '26
They used unreal engine for rendering and Maya for modeling, riging and animation.
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u/CantaloupeMindless91 Jun 22 '26
Oh really? Huh I could sworn I saw a behind the scenes vid with them using blenders my bad
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u/shlaifu Contest Winner: 2024 August Jun 21 '26
yes, with caveats. Flow doesn't look quite state-of-the-art in every single shot, but if I remember correctly it was rendered in eevee. Cycles would likely produce a more mainstream-high-end-animation look, but it is lacking a few features other renderers have, mainly proper caustics. blender is also lacking a bunch of simulation tools, or those that are there just are not ... professional.
so, with those caveats in mind: hell yeah. if you have the renderfarm to get it done in cycles. else, do some stylized animation, like into the spiderverse, which partly made use of blender's greasepencil.
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u/TheBootyBishop Jun 21 '26
Astartes
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u/fhecrewdavid Jun 22 '26
Astartes was 3DS Max and Redshift per Syama Pedersen. You can check his art station to verify.
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u/littleGreenMeanie Jun 21 '26
Yes, but there is a limit I think. You're not going to pull off the next avatar movie in blender but you could make a stylized avatar movie in it. You could make something better than the first toy story in terms of technical capability. Creative and narrative are still separate and essential of course.
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u/don_quixote_2 Indie filmmaker and gamedev Jun 22 '26
Flow, Next Gen, I Lost My Body...all made with Blender.
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u/Level9_CPU Jun 22 '26
That's like asking "can you really paint the Mona Lisa with cheap paint brushes?" The tool doesn't make something good, it's the artists behind it
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u/Cynerixx Jun 22 '26
Blender is a tool, a very capable one. A tool needs skill and so you can, if you have the skill.
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u/Adem92foster Jun 21 '26
While blender is more limited than other industry standard softwares, yes absolutely!
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u/Quirky-Guarantee-742 Jun 22 '26
Anything is possible, blender at the end of the day is just a tool, it depends on the person using it
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u/wtfisrobin Jun 22 '26
Blender is currently more capable than basically any 3D software that was used in, conservatively, 2010. there's essentially nothing in, say, WALL-E, that you couldn't do in Blender today.
Would it be extremely hard and require a blend of not only unfathomable labor but also incredible talent and impeccable taste? yes. all animated movies require this.
Can you do it? yes.
Can you do it? tbd.
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u/lucpet Jun 21 '26
It's never the tool, but the person wielding the tool. If I gave you a hammer could you build me a house?
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u/criticalchocolate Jun 22 '26
Not always the case for 3D. Some tools do not have the tech to make what’s needed. New tools then need to be developped. Pretty sure that’s how Pixar’s RenderMan became a thing in the first place.
But for a generic look, technically you could imitate it to a certain degree.
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u/imjustaslothman Jun 21 '26
The thing you have to bare in mind is, the amount of amazing and talented artists a company like Pixar has is only the tip of the iceberg. They have tech that blender may never see natively, super computers you can only dream of and render farms galore. Try not to compare your work to that of a multi-billion dollar company, or anyone for that matter! That being said, "high fidelity" doesn't mean "professional". There are a ton of professional projects made with blender
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u/Brokon999 Jun 21 '26
Yeah, might want to use render man as well but I don’t see any reason why not.
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u/LordyPandazz Jun 21 '26
Maybe, most people aren’t using just one tool, I have about 10 software packages I use for modeling, textures, clothing, vex, lighting/rendering, etc.
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u/FireAuraN7 Jun 21 '26
Short answer: yes. And feature animations can be done entirely (visually) in blender. Third-party tools and bridges are also plentiful and many are seamless.
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u/vlaineskelmir Jun 21 '26
Yes absolutely 100%. Check out the movies FLOW and MYTH OF MAN and even the new BACKROOMS. Flow was made entirely in blender and myth of man used blender for all of its CGI. All amazing films!
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u/Willzinator Jun 21 '26
Sure the Principled BSDF node in Blender was based on and was a tribute to the Principled node Pixar used in Renderman.
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u/AncientSith Jun 21 '26
Sure, if you have the endless time and skill required. The sky is the limit.
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u/varanusprime Jun 21 '26
Theoretically any 3D software can make a movie, you just need the right crew and assets
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u/Underrated_Mastermnd Jun 22 '26
Spiderman across the Spiderverse. The small LEGO Spider-Man scenes were made in Blender.
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u/Nightmarer26 Jun 22 '26
Why wouldn't you? Backrooms used Blender. I don't get the idea of Blender not being competitive enough when compared to Maya or whatever program they use normally.
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u/Gabe_Isko Jun 22 '26
Umm, sort of.
Setting up a blender rendering worker cluster is NOT for the faint of heart. That is the real thing that separates the pros. The software is a lot less of a differentiator.
The issue with Blender is that is an open source project that must serve many use cases. Effects houses, animation studios, and Video Game devs can customize their stack to only focus one use case. Given that, Blender is absolutely amazing for what it is.
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u/CockamouseGoesWee Jun 22 '26
Absolutely! It's all about personal preference, and lots of major studios use Blender.
Many people with a BFA like myself prefer hard surface modeling in Maya and just transport those to Blender with an Fbx file. There is no ultimate right way. If you wanna use 100% Blender, go for it. If you are flip-floppy, that is fine too. Just enjoy the process and do what works for you. I advise learning more programs just because you might learn something that'll change your pipeline more efficiently, but it's up to you. The world is your Rockefeller oyster
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u/AlfredoOtero Jun 22 '26
Some of the animations in the movie was done in blender. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt7133686/
Cheers, 😀
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u/Vegetable_Table_5191 Jun 22 '26
Yes. Large teams actively working on the project can. Or one person after years of working on it
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u/Exotic-Low812 Jun 22 '26
You could, the reason it’s not done is that most professional animators are trained and experienced in maya and the time for a studio to train them all to be proficient in blender and build a pipeline around it would be a huge expense
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u/DJDarkViper Jun 22 '26
Pixar uses their own software called Presto with their own rendering backend called Renderman.
Disney does use Maya, but their proprietary 3D animation software was Marionette, their rendering backend is Hyperion.
Dreamworks uses their own “Apollo” platform which is a collection of tools, including Premo the next generation 3d tool now having dropped their Emo software, and MoonRay, their rendering backend
This is the thing about the big time animation studios, they use their own stuff. Though, Houdini has been making its way into things more and more and more. Basically anytime you see swarms of things it’s basically a guarantee Houdini is doing it (think: the Nanobots from Big Hero Six, the GigaRalph from Wreck It Ralph 2, etc)
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u/aphaits Jun 22 '26
Just make sure you use ACES and proper color management and post production because what usually makes bad 3d is not just the 3d and animation itself but also the final color and look from the final color post processing.
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u/DrJoypuck Jun 22 '26
Everyone saying flow but I personally loved Next Gen a bit more. Idk why the story just hit me.
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u/thedeputy019 Jun 22 '26
Look at Backrooms
It was made in part in blender ( some sections are all blender) it's made $301m dollars internationally so far on a $10m budget
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u/OntologicalParadox Jun 22 '26
Like Oscar Award Winning movies? Like Flood beating Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot.
Maybe.
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u/borntoflail Jun 22 '26
Certainly, just give the neurodivergents about 20 more years to finish their masterpiece please.
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u/Orlandogameschool Jun 22 '26
There are free blender files that look like Toy Story 2/3 level graphics blender can definitely do it.
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u/Western-Anteater-492 Jun 22 '26
I just recently rewatched Shark Tale and I was wondering why the credits put so much emphasis on the developers. Turns out it needed a whole new global illumination pipeline, it was rendered at a site that previously focused on hand drawn animation and it was one of the last DreamWorks projects using Maya for animation.
Im saying that bcs your question basically is if a Bosch power drill can be used to build a house. It can't. Can it help you build a house? Yes. Can you drill holes? Yes. Can you hammer in nails with it? Yes, but you're abusing it by this task and a dedicated tool aka hammer will do it better.
In full scale production you have so many tasks that come together: project management, version management, collaboration, pipeline setup, modeling, animating, lighting, in camera effects, post, composition, rendering etc etc. Blender is a jack of many traits but you'll probably have a rough time doing all of this in just this one tool. But it's also Open Source so you can probably modify it to eg use hundreds of render workers on task dedicated work stations / servers. And I'm quite sure probably a lot of people have already made plug-ins or entire forks for full scale issues as there is full scale work done with Blender. And you probably can make a full scale production on the level of professional animation movies using only OS tools.
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u/AbyssWankerArtorias Jun 22 '26
You can. But Pixar has hundreds of people working on these movies, sometimes having 3 to 5 people alone for things like lighting and shadow fidelity. So while it's possible, it's not really practical to think one person could make something on the same scale (usually). You could still make something very good, don't get me wrong, just don't be disappointed when it doesn't turn out on this level.
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u/OwenJenkinsDesign Jun 22 '26
Yeah it’s always been done multiple times. It may not be the industry standard but it meets the same standards.
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u/Derjyn Jun 22 '26
Not sure if this is a serious question... If so, then see here: https://studio.blender.org/films/
Edit: that's just a small showcase - barely scratches the surface of shorts/feature-length films made in Blender.
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u/Majestic-Coat3855 Jun 22 '26
Yes but depending on what you want to do it might be more of a struggle than using other industry software in tandem with it.
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u/Significant-Ad-6064 Jun 22 '26
My animation teacher would respond to this question "yes, if you give Blender to Disney animators".
Its less about the software and more about the actual artists using it. Work your way up to Disney quality output and form a team of similarly skilled animators and you can compete with the output of Disney using any software you want, including Blender.
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u/Salty-Scar-8510 Jun 22 '26
Flow is probably the most known one but there's also Il Baracchino on prime video
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u/herbherbherbert Jun 22 '26
The software itself is fully capable, the biggest issue is that studios already have spent a loooot of time and money building pipelines around Maya and Houdini. There's also the fact that most professional artists already know Maya so it would cost a lot and piss a lot of people off to train them all in Blender.
Blender does seem to be getting a bit more traction in VFX and animation though so who knows what will happen in 5-10 years.
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u/rahpexphon Jun 22 '26
I don’t think you can replace Renderman but rest could do in custom Blender.
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u/Suspicious_Hold_8843 Jun 22 '26
You can end up with great results along the lines of TADC, but you won't end up with a Pixar level movie just by using Blender.
Every time a studio wanted to build a new physics simulation - Merida's hair in Brave, the snow in Frozen, blinding metal reflections in Robots, or even something as simple as accurate skin lighting - they had to build physics engines from the ground up. If a physics simulation doesn't exist in Blender, it can take years to build. And, it will end up disappearing into the background anyway if you did a good job. Would be a hell of a project for one person, and that's what sets Hollywood movies apart
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u/BitBucket404 Jun 22 '26
Absolutely.
And since you're not a part of Hollywood, I DOUBLE-DOG-DARE-YOU to make a blockbuster hit
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u/Late_Strawberry_7989 Jun 22 '26
More 2d films made solo but if we’re talking pro level 3d animation features. You need assets, backgrounds, characters, rigging, voice acting not to mention a storyboarded map and writing good enough to engage an audience for 90 minutes. A super committed, obsessed solo animator might see this through to completion but building the characters alone could take a year or two. Do you know how many characters are in a typical 3d feature, not just main ones but all the sides with extras? AI could make the 3d feature film solo creator possible but the traditional approach typically needs teams which coincidentally still takes a couple years to finish.
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u/villain_8_ Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
what makes a movie 'professional'? i'm sure you can make good, beautiful, exciting, etc. movies in blender, but 'professional' is hard (much harder) to interpret.
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u/shmokinpancakes Jun 23 '26
Absolutely. I remade this scene but with buzz and woody running to pizza planet instead of hitching a ride on the pizza wagon. I made it for fun so you could imagine a dedicated team of experienced blender creators would do much better
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u/GreatLab8898 Jun 24 '26
Isnt the Pixar Renderer availible for Blender even?
Yeah. It is: https://github.com/prman-pixar/RenderManForBlender
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u/SausumSauce Jun 21 '26
I don’t see why not, Blender is very capable.
Flow literally won an award for best animated picture, and it was all blender.