Studios that are using Blender?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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Hi all,

Do you have a list of all studios using Blender in production for games and movie / series / VFX ?

I know that Blender Studio use it of course, Ubisoft in modeling, Barnstorm VFX, Tangent Animation (closed…), Epic Games, Cube, “Tu nous za pas vu” but wich others studios use it ?

I asked this question because we’ll start a project and one of our partner use Blender (Auto rig pro creator) and we will need to done some layout, animation, shading on the project and our CG sup is quite, how said, afraid of using Blender.

Me and a really good lead animator tell him that is a great solution (we use it since a few years now), but he still afraid.

With this kind of name and the possibility to show him some project like Next Gen, The man in the high castle and some others good stuff, maybe it will be less afraid.

Thank you,

Matt

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I think there is a distinction to be made that is very important and that is using Blender exclusively and using Blender in combination with other tools.
You will find many studios that fall into the latter category and I think these dwarf the first category by a lot.
It is not that difficult to integrate Blender (artists) into an established pipeline, while it is much more difficult to build a complete pipeline with Blender.
To be quite honest with you, I still think Blender (alone) is very unproven and does not have a solid track record.
This is evident if you look at your own examples.
“Next Gen” and “The man in the high Castle” fall firmly into the latter category since both studios used Houdini for their VFX (and Nuke for compositing, I think).

Having said that, I have no idea what you are trying to archive and how high your demands are - it might be 100% doable and easy and your CG Supe is just overly fearful, but it is also entirely possible that his apprehension is justified.

In order to do proper risk evaluation, you need to look at examples that are identical/similar in technical demand to your project.

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Both studio had in-house Blender developers. The Blender they used is not what we have.

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That was certainly true back when the movie/show came out, but Is that still true in 2023?

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Probably? unless they merged all their work. Also “The man in the high Castle” was 2017. I haven’t seen more article about Blender from them recently. Their Vancouver office is mostly using Maya/Houdini.

Tangent was also switching to Maya/Houdini before they closed.

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Maybe you could show him Recap of Blender Conference 2022.

Showing him talks from conference could reassure him about the fact, that Blender is professionally used or increase his fear about lacks and requests formulated in talks. That is double-edged.

Anyways, the best way to convince him will be to be frank, about the state of software.
You are talking about layout, animation and shading.
You have a good lead animator behind you, able to explain Blender abilities in terms of layout and animation.
I know you are competent in terms of shading, and able to do the same about EEVEE and Cycles.

You are qualified to dissipate his fears about the abilities of the tool, in those areas.
So, is he afraid about something else, like interoperability, pipeline, members of team who will need to learn Blender, ability to find a back-up, workflow ?
Ask him to put on paper his doubts. And, then, you will be able to bring positive or negative answers.

Because if you try to guess, you may miss the point ; and the opportunity may pass.

3.6 will be an LTS, released at the end of June ( phase II of Viewport Compositor, baby steps of Simulation nodes).
Sculpting stuff and Cycles Lighy Linking have been postponed to Blender 4.0.
That is a good moment to study, seriously, such question.

Maybe, some answers need a little bit of research. Maybe, some just need a little demo of software.
Maybe, some need pushed tests.
What is certain is that : if he asks no question, he will obtain no answer.

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In Japan all these + A-1 Pictures (Sony)
https://twitter.com/anime_blender?lang=en

FtFpK0AakAA3swP

00:17

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I know that a chunk of the work Tangent did for their movie has trickled down into Blender.
Support for VDB volumes was one of the features if I remember correctly.
I have no information about Barnstorm VFX, but I know that they used Houdini for all the volume stuff and cycles for the environment and then comped it together. (if I remember correctly.)
My memory is little-bit fuzzy.
I would say whatever their Blender devs did back then makes no big difference in the grand scheme of things.
Both Blender and Houdini are not the same as they where 6 years ago, neither is our hardware (performance).

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the people from Everything Everywhere All At Once used not only blender but the Andrew price’s Donut too

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Hi,
It’s for a mix of 3D and 2D movie. Layout and characters animation will be done in Blender. It’s not a full Blender pipeline of course. We still have Substance Painter, Zbrush and co.

I think the more fear of our CG sup is more not finding artist but an animator that done some “big 3D movies” animated with Maya moved to Blender and he like it more than Maya.

For me, I’m currently working on Maya (current project) and use Blender at home (already use it in productions too for some quick VFX). As well Maya is not use now from modelling to the end in a pipeline.

In our cases, it’s just layout, animation and maybe modeling. Our CG sup is really good in python and the Blender API is not so bad :wink:

For me the only bad part in Blender is no reference editor like in Maya but you can build one and the internal structure of a Blender file is more square than a maya file.

Thx for your answers.

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Paris-based Autour de Minuit is 100% blender too, right @kyraneth ?

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Thx for your answers

For me, it’s really possible to use it, the main studio on the project use it everyday. For interoperability, in the current production, the studio who do the rendering use Blender for scene assembly using alembic and usd and send it to Unreal Engine 5. They replaced Maya. The other studio working on the current project too use only Blender.

To be honest, I had the same fear before 2.8 and after tried it, my doubt disepeared.

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Thank you to all for your answers, if yu know others studios, I take it :wink:

Matt

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the “RRR” movie some vfx shots were done in blender by the makuta studio you can read about it here
Visual Effects for the Indian blockbuster “RRR”

EDIT
Blue zoo studio uses it for some of its short videos.
Unicorn wars was done in blender grease pencil

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Yes indeed, Autour de Minuit, and its studio branch, Autour du Volcan, use a full Blender pipeline, with the occasional After Effects and Houdini depending on the clients and project at hand. We made Unicorn Wars entirely using Blender, it’s a 3D-2D hybrid, and we leaned heavily into Blender’s strength in this regard. We’ve animated a lot of series and films using Blender, and the “easiest” onboarding, in our experience, happens with animators: Tools are generally quite similar in most software, and there are no major paradigm differences such as maybe in rigging or in render engines, so I wouldn’t necessarily worry about that.

To me, you need to have the senior staff comfortable with the software, and not the junior hires which can be trained, and in your case, you seem to have that! :slight_smile:

Here’s an overview of some of our projects done entirely or mostly in Blender over the years:

And there are much much more Blender-centric productions, a lot of them in france, but all over the world. Here’s a non-exhaustive overview:

  • Les Fees Specials Uses Blender and has recently started contributing to GPs development
  • SPA studios was using Blender for their next animated film, Ember, before Netflix suddenly pulled the plug on them a la Tangent
  • Xilam/Cube are two huge studios in France that have a Blender-centric pipeline, notably used in the film “I Lost My Body” by Jeremy Clapin
  • Supamonks have been using Blender heavily in their pipeline until recently
  • The “Automated Customer Service” episode in Love Death Robots S02 was made entirely in Blender save for the smoke sims.

And much much more :slight_smile: Blender has been having bigger and bigger adoption in middle-sized studios all around the world and especially in Europe and Asia, but the anglosphere seems determined to judge its popularity and validity by looking only at Hollywood and it’s 5-6 biggest VFX vendors.

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Hi,

Thank you for your answers :wink:

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Hi,
thanks for this interesting topic, as I’m also looking for informations about Blender integration.

As a very small company, we’re producing short movies (but nothing as fancy about VFX as the mentionned studios) and we recently started to shift from 3dsmax+Vray to Blender.
The 2 main reasons for this were the lack of updates of AD products (since max 2013, mostly) which then became really overpriced, and the growing part of Blender teaching in universities/art schools, giving skills with it to juniors (and often Maya, as far as I can see).

As the senior artist of the team, I can say that I’m not comfortable at all with Blender ! :joy:

I won’t talk about the “esoteric”, heavily hotkeys-based UI and some strange concepts or lacking features that I find very tiedous or time-consuming, I stick to 3dsmax or Zbrush for modeling and leave the choice to my artists of their favorite tools. I’m aware that I can’t erase years of my habits in a few months.
I’d like to add that on the contrary, I found Blender to be really good at non-PBR and stylized stuff, and Grease Pencil is a very cool tool.

I’m mostly concerned about rendering management, I can’t find a solid tool like Backburner to manage renders through a render farm or the Assets Tracking from 3dsmax to manage network paths. I found Blender to be quite fragile with heavy scenes and I don’t like to rely on the add-ons/Blender Market system, causing to have to switch if one becomes unsupported or not updated (which can happen very fast)…

I wonder how much in-house development these studios put into their Blender pipeline. If someone has a clue, that would be very handy to me.

As a testimony, at this time, I’m quite disappointed, I feel like having lost a lot of time looking into new pipelines including Blender (for building scenes and rendering, not modeling or shading) and I’m right now thinking of moving to something else and rethink the team’s pipelines.

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Hey Shimrod, welcome to the forums!

In our Studio and the studios I am in contact with, there is of course development around Blender, not more and not less than around any other software in any other pipelines and software suites. In fact, I think there is a huge amount of overhead removed by centralizing as much as possible around one software, there are much less compatibility layers to be developed and maintained for back and forth between software (one of the main advantages of Blender in my opinion!)

I’m not surprised you are finding the switch difficult, I’m sure it would be the same with me if I am moving a whole team and all the responsibility of that move being on my shoulders, while I am not super comfortable with the software! I’ve seen several teams and studios trying to do the move to Blender, and, without a “Blenderhead” on board, it was often really painful and a failed experiment… the seniors often treated a Blender pipeline as a Maya-but-free one, without leaning into the software’s strengths and working around its weaknesses, and accepting a new pipeline and way of doing things…

In a more practical sense, we often develop our own tools, or adapt ones on the Blendermarket to our needs and maintain them. A TD is always a welcome addition on the team to make sure all the add-ons and scripts are maintained and working smoothly!

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The Blender Studio has recently published a website that gives more detail on the overall pipeline they use: https://studio.blender.org/pipeline/

With software such as Flamenco for the render manager and Kitsu for asset tracking.

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Hi Shimrod,

For me it’s the inverse, I make models faster than in Maya :wink: The addons is a good part of Blender. Of courses the key is not to have 8000+ addons but some are really good (Flip Fluids, Kaboom and this brothers, Fluent, Photographer, QuadRemesher). I’m better for my custom projects since I’m working with Blender but it’s my feelings and of courses I spend 3 months to get the shorcuts and the way of thinking for Blender.

For the rendering side, I’m quite surprise that backburner is still alive. Many Online renderfarm is compatible with Blender and for local renderfarm many open source softwares work well (exemples : OpenCue, Flamenco, Deadline or Coalition). Of course, you need to dev plugins to send the job from Blender for some but you can also create a job from the renderfarm manager. All the tools I talked about are python API and as Blender works with command line too, not so hard.

One part not really good for the moment is the scene assembly but soon it’ll be not a problem as USD grows inside Blender and the Alembic pipeline is really good right now as you can use defered rendering on alembic and not have huge scene in viewport. Also, if you spend a few time to learn how linking between scenes is working, it’s better than Maya but, that’s right, you need to do python :slight_smile: .

For the building scene optimization for rendering and co, I started an R&D on my own pipeline.

In conclusion, it’s really depends of your goals and motivation. Right now, more of big blockbuster are assembled in Katana, Guerilla render, Clarisse IFX or Gaffer HQ. No scenes from this kind of projects can be old by Maya. Geometry nodes and USD / Alembic start to open the way to do scene assembly more easilly without load 300 GB of data in the viewport but I agree with you, it’s a step to do or not.

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