These guys did a lot of work on the new highly anticipated District 9 film.
From their site
"At Image Engine we use many open source projects as part of our research and development efforts, and in return are now releasing key components of our internal toolset as open source.
Our first release is the IECore library, a set of C++ and Python classes providing datatypes and algorithms applicable to a broad spectrum of visual effects development. The library forms the basis of many of our internal tools, including our proprietary dynamics simulation package “Mayhem”. We are releasing the code under the umbrella of the Cortex project, to encourage contributions from the wider community…
We also plan on releasing our proprietary libraries for interfacing IECore with RenderMan, Maya and OpenGL. We hope that this will encourage the growth of Cortex into a code base compatible with a wide range of industry standard tools."
http://opensource.image-engine.com/
I wonder is there anything useful here in relation to Blender development.