Yeah, those people would say shit like this but in reality, they’ve actually moved to maya pipeline 5-6 months ago and wasn’t using Blender for the most part, so them being shut down had nothing to do with Blender.
Aha, I stand corrected. I guess they switched to Maya and Houdini after Maya wrapped.
If this is true I wonder if they just switched for one project or if they hit to many roadblocks with Blender?
You’d have to ask someone in TA’s leadership for a real answer to that. There are a dozen reasons why a studio might change their pipeline. It could have been, like you said, that Blender wasn’t cutting it - but they had a couple of success projects under their belt and Loupe was looking really promising. It could have been because of the requirements of the new projects, or something to do with the agreement with Netflix. We could sit here all day and speculate. Maybe someone in the Cartoon Brew comments will eventually spill some insider secrets.
EDIT: For what it’s worth, Bobby in the comments mentioned this:
In Tangent’s blind hunger to grow and take on additional work (Monkey King and HITC) they decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater, abandoning Blender, aside from some Modelling tasks and build a ground up USD pipeline based on Maya and Houdini. This was started on day one of production on Monkey King. One might guess how this all worked out. Production deadlines came and went all while artists were still waiting on basic tools to be built. Cohesion between Maya and Houdini was never resolved as deadlines evaporated. This along with a client that was unable to lock a basic script lead to what seemed to be total loss of faith from Netflix. High in the Clouds never left the testing phases and likely never would have based on Tangent’s inability to produce rendered frames.
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Interesting, Thanks for posting that.
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That Blender wasn’t cutting it is plausible, because it was before all of the optimization work in Editmode, OSD, Cycles, and other areas began (at the time when professionals mulled the idea of leaving Blender because the devs. seemed to not care about performance for high or even mid poly work). Indeed, 2.80 will feel like a toy in places like modeling compared to the upcoming 3.0 release.
Though it appeared the way they changed pipelines was an incredibly reckless move (as they did not even wait for the tooling for be in place first). Tangent will unfortunately end up as a tale of how to not run a studio (as a warning for future would-be producers).
I wonder if they were missing out on opportunities because they couldn’t fit in the other studios pipeline that used Maya?
That is a good question but I sense also a move by upper management who made the wrong call and had poor planing / foresight.
Only because some are in management positions does not mean they are also good at their job.
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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.
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Wow, if this is true it’s quite a a damning tale of mismanagement. My first impression was that the studio had the rug pulled under their feet due to no fault of their own, due to Netflix deciding to cut projects for financial reasons.
But judging by this, it was poor judgement from the studio management that led to its demise.
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Streaming services are not having this issue. The issue they are having is a lag in content. The last thing they need is a production studio that is capable of producing digital content with remote workers, turn around and have internal issues that block them from producing content.
I am not even sure if NetFlix was a part of it that decision. Or simply the looming deadlines passed with nothing to show and of course, then, no money.
It is hard to take one employee statement “tossed the baby out with the bath water”. It is just a perspective. And you can bet this was a Blender user who probably did not even understand the implications of doing so. (Sorry Bobby, I am just guessing. But I will make a further guess if you were even in a Maya pipeline before you were not high enough up the chain to understand the implications hard TD decisions. And even if you claim I am wrong, I am sorry. The comment speaks for itsself. It reeks of a true lack of understanding of large production pipelines in Blender.)
What they were attempting between Maya and Houdini it would be safe to say would have been impossible in Blender with enough quality to sell.
So to try to imply it was changing to Maya is myopic at best.
EDIT: By the way I am also bummed about this, as this seemed like a company with promise. But also interesting I have been pointing to this company as a large studio that still embraced Blender. So much for that false impression.
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I wish them the best. next gen was really really well made.
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The “employee” does say in the second paragraph in the image I posted that Tangent Studio completed two more large scale productions using Blender, Maya and the Three.
“…It’s truly epic in scale, quality and polish.”
If a studio like Tangent can produce three features films at the highest of levels using mostly Blender then I tend to agree with his last paragraph where he states that the pipeline really isn’t as important as people make it sound. 
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Which is a reason why the season of optimization work being done for 3.0 is so important. Should that work not be getting done right now, other studios that adopted Blender will abandon it and Ton’s dream of bringing Hollywood to Blender is done, it is simply not going to happen and it is more likely that a fork will achieve it as the BF closes its doors. The slogan ‘we have put the fun back in 3D’ is a lie if the program is chugging on any animation more complex than cartoons.
Of course, it seems the BF over the last decade has development a knack for development breakthroughs and for making the right decisions right when it seems it was over for Blender as anything more than a hobby app. I remember a previous time that this occurred, but then we got Bmesh and Cycles. Now we see this again and all of this performance work in key areas is getting done. The result will likely be this event as a temporary setback for Blender’s adoption.
I think there are several reasons, and probably a studio with 400 people is very large, and also I think some reasons can be traced back to NetFlix which in the meantime is creating its internal animation studios by reducing external costs, I believe that NetFlix has a big role in this.
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Tangent did not throw out Blender. The presentation about Blender+USD at GTC 2021 (“Blender USD Import and Rendering [S31984]”, https://gtc21.event.nvidia.com) outlines the transition to a USD pipeline that took place at Tangent. Blender, Maya, Houdini, Substance, etc were all in use simultaneously, and a fork of Cycles was the render engine of choice.
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Please stop your constant guessing game and spreading misinformation!
You are wrong on all accounts, as always.
Regards,
an ex-Tangent employee
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Sad news indeed. I really enjoyed Next-Gen as a movie in its own right, but it was also a shining light for Blender, proving that a great team can still make an excellent feature film with mostly free software (though I’m sure that was not the primary goal of using Blender).
I’m looking forward to seeing Maya and the Three and wish everyone that lost their jobs recently the best.
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