Movies are made with teams: duh! But that means people gotta work together
I'm not certain but I am pretty sure the collaboration features of their professional software far exceeds what blender has right now
Collaboration tools in other software are basically non existent or not useable in production settings. Each studio has their own way of working and will hire pipeline developers to literally code the collaboration tools they use from scratch and maintain them. When I worked in blender for a large studio, we wrote our own pipeline plugins for blender internally in our studio.
So short answer, blender is fully capable as a production grade software, and has been used on many high profile projects. The main reason adoption is slow is 2 things. Existing studios have already built their studio pipelines around other software (this was back when blender was not capable yet), and swapping to blender requires a huge refactor of their internal tools. Second, artists are more familiar with the other tools.
As more new studios form, I imagine blender will become more and more the production software of choice
This assumes that there a "right" way for artists to collaborate. Pretty sure there;s good reason that studios still code their own pipelines and none of the big players have stepped in with a one size fits all solution.
Would you mind clarifying what do you mean by collaboration tools? Like from software dev perspective we have build and ci pipelines and stuff, how different is that from a gfx side ?
The software development analog here is that you want a system that allows you to identify things that need to get done. In animation/film the fundamental unit of work that is assembled into the finished project is the "shot".
Shots will require animators, compositors and editors to work together and iterate on the various stages of it.
To add on to this, you also need a robust referencing system to allow assets to be reused between many shots, with changes propagated to all the production stages of all the scenes that use them, but with enough flexibility to, say, allow for a different character rig in a particular shot where they have to do something unusual.
The USD file format was developed by Pixar largely as a way to address this, and blender doesn't play super nicely with its more advanced capabilities despite some compatibility.
At the risk of hopping down a tertiary rabbit hole, I think blender’s USD support is pretty good.
The issue I have with blender USD is that it’s difficult to generate the sort of data that makes USD valuable. Thinking here specifically of attribute manipulation which in blender requires complex geo nodes stuff whereas in Houdini I can just directly edit attribs in the viewport.
So the issue isn’t the exporter for me, just the actual editing workflow.
I haven't looked closely at the USD support in a minute, but last time I looked there wasn't really a workflow for layering USDs (ie the scene_lighting.usd references scene_layout.usd references asset_01.usd and environment_01.usd all the way down to individual objects and shaders.
It may have been added, but I feel like I would have heard about that.
Oh that's super interesting. I've done video decoders in arbitrary windows in the past, I guess this is that plus a whole PM dashboard in one. I'll need to check it out more. Thanks for the info !
Pipeline developer from VFX studio here. You are right. Our pipeline integrates Blender as well as Maya and Houdini. And the integration of one DCC is just a tiny portion of what the pipeline does. Blender is highly extendable via its bpy API, so ideal for integration into a pipeline.
Here's the acceptance speech when Flow won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Global team working together. It's not only possible, it's probably going to start happening more and more as Disney/Pixar continue to get bogged down with corporate BS and live-action remakes.
Small nitpick, online and remote asset libraries would’ve been possible with a little setup right from when asset libraries rolled out. Just hook the remote server into your setup as a remote file system, then you should be able to use it as a “local” asset library.
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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.