Just curious if anyone has read an interview or seen a video where a game studio has shipped a game using Blender to create their animations from. I assume Maya is still the predominant choice currently, but wasn’t sure if there have been examples of studios using Blender for a published game.
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Established, big studios like Ubisoft aren’t likely to do so, but I can tell you the small-to-mid segment of game developers, particularly new companies: a big percentage of these model and animate in Blender.
I’ve worked at many studios where the animations are authored in Blender.
If you want to know which particular ones, look at their job ads.
That’s not to say animation is perfect in Blender, and if you look at the recent Animation Workshop you’ll see they’re aware of the pain points, and are working on a design to improve these areas.
edit: link fixing
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Ubisoft used to donate to Blender and even developed their own multi-user addon https://github.com/ubisoft/mixer
It was designed in a production context and was used as an experimental tool
I think this is pretty clear that they were using Blender.
Whether they still are, I don’t know. And that addon they made is no longer maintained.
And, whether or not they did animation specifically… Hmm…
Beyond that, I think it’s a good bet that Netease or Activision, which currently donate to the Blender fund, are also using Blender. It doesn’t make much sense for them to donate otherwise IMO, this is kinda niche for marketing for them specifically. They don’t have a large userbase of people working with Blender like Steam, Epic and Unreal do, nor do they sell something to use Blender on like a GPU.
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Thanks for the reply Michael. The 2025 roadmap for the new animation tools/system was why I was curious if any game studio has incorporated Blender as part of it’s animation pipeline. I know you definitely can export/import animations to game engines, but I just wasn’t sure if it was a smooth enough workflow for studios to use in their game dev.
Their 2d department used to donate to Blender. Having said that: Some inside Ubisoft use Blender, I personally know a few.
Animation and final export is very often still Maya in the bigger companies though. They have a pipeline set up, and the larger the company the bigger the investment to switch.
Ubisoft (the film and TV division) did use Blender in their 70m long Rabbids invasion which was broadcasted worldwide on Netflix in 2022.
A few quotes from the blogpost:
We handled the storyboard, previz and editing stages internally while the following steps were done by partners studios: Supamonks, which worked mostly on Blender, Anima for a great part of the animation and Miroslav Pilon studio for the sounds and voices.
We chose to use the version 2.83 of Blender because it was a LTS and we needed stability on the project.
The challenge for us – apart from using Blender in this kind of big production for the first time, which was pretty exciting – was to offer to our movie director a very flexible previz environment so that he and the artists could concentrate on the quality and unleash their creativity.
From what I read, most of the animation was done by anima studio which use Maya in their pipeline, but everything else (except sounds and voices) was made in blender.
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