No. Sorry but Blender still isn’t there yet. I can vouch for this. Using it in my small studio. If I had a budget for it, I would switch to Maya in a heartbeat.
5 years from now we’ll into 3.0+ this may not be the case. This is only if the developers get thier head around what it really means to work in a large production.
The Sprite film has this comment worth taking into consideration.
Francesco Siddi
Author
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One of the technical targets of the Sprite Fright project is to research, develop and share a fully open source CG production pipeline. This is the set of tools and processes built around and within Blender to support the film creation process.
Over the years, the Open Movie teams have developed and shared countless tools for with this purpose, and this project aims at better documenting, organizing and expanding them. Sprite Fright also presents some unique challenges:
- The complexity of the short is higher than previous productions (6 main speaking characters, crowd scenes with 20+ characters and creatures, complex sets, various effects, etc.)
- Most of the production is happening remotely (this was not part of the planning when we started working on the short)
- The production crew counts around 15 artists, one of the largest groups we had while producing a short.
Keep in mind that broadly speaking this is nothing.
To say that this is the largest production they have ever had speaks volumes to the fact the developers just don’t really understand or fully comprehend Blender outside of the the BI bubble.
It is when you get outside if that, where the issues come. And when you get past simple sets and a few characters.
So a large studio moving to Maya? Production proven for decades compared to a small development team who has not even experienced this world - with Blender - is a no brainer.
Sounds like there were other issues this studio had. No idea what they were
But just moving to Maya was not one of them.
Using Blender requires work-arounds. A lot of them in fundamental areas that need to work properly in any sizeable production.
By the way as has been mentioned many times the production team for Next Gen had to work extra hard and develop tools for Blender to bring it up to speed for production. Maybe they got tired of that and the issues with Blender were fundamental, and could not be patched.