Yeah I do not think that Bender will replace Maya in Maya based pipelines, but studios are born every day. So tomorrow some studio might built their pipeline around Blender if Blender has enough tools that can carry such pipeline. This is where Alembic is important for example.
Your original post talked about how Arnold took over Renderman, so I assumed you meant Blender taking over a Maya pipeline.
Still, the popularity of Blender will be much slower than Arnold just because of Blenders role. It may be a super popular modelling software but it will be a while before you see a lot of studios adopting it as a complete replacement for Maya (even in new animation studios - simply because of all the plugins and rigging being superior to Blender).
You’ll see it being used in studios for the asset department maybe (Modo is in a similar situation) but Blender still has a few years ahead of it before a dent will be made.
The only place Blender can really sit comfortably in a large-scale production workflow is as a modeling and texturing workflow at this point. Linking, scene/character management, animation tools, sim tools, hair tools, particles, render API, the ability to easily extend functionality without rebuilding the source, and other key areas aren’t anywhere close to ready for the types of workflows and turnaround times large animation studios need and expect. I’d argue that only Maya, Softimage, and to a lesser extend Houdini have ever really ticked off all of the “big production” checkboxes for studios with the manpower to be developing their own internal tools and pipelines.
If someone here had a few million Dollars (or Euros) they can throw at the BF to massively increase the size of the core team, than it would be possible to accelerate that a bit.
What might be the best way to get more studio support with Blender is to appeal to the smaller VFX houses and indie studios that might be balking at Autodesk going rental-only (with the idea that they may not need to sacrifice much to sharply reduce their costs). The reason being that having all of the big production tools in place is unlikely to happen soon simply because of resources.
One factor that I think has been overlooked is the enterprise-level support provided to the big studios (ie. large numbers of licenses) by developers like Autodesk. If the studio needs the software to do something different, or something is working quite how they want, the support team will analyze the situation and come up with a solution in short order. That’s not something directly available to small studios, even with Blender; smaller numbers of users means at least some level of multi-tasking and not necessarily any kind of dedicated in-house technical or development support. If there was some sort of Blender “hit team” for small studio support it would provide a much greater incentive for adoption.
Max and Maya are basicly plugin hosts at this point. Which is a very good thing. I remember blender (back in the 1.1s) used to offer plugin support but it was never really taken advantage of
yep. when we were designing our pipeline they organised a call with a load of their specialists (names id personally been following for years) and we had an hour long conference call discussing the plus and minus points of different solutions. No extra charge