Khara and Anime/CG production company "Project Studio Q, Inc." are preparing to switch their primary 3D CG tools to Blender. Blender will be used for some parts of "EVANGELION:3.0+1.0" they are currently working on.
Khara has been using Autodesk "3ds Max" as their primary tool so far. "EVANGELION:3.0+1.0" production is mainly done with 3ds Max. They are now starting to switch from 3ds Max to Blender. Usually the reason being "due to differences such as quality and functionalities", but Khara's reason is different.
Hiroyasu Kobayashi, General Manager of Digital Dpt. and Director of the Board of Khara and President of Studio Q, and Daisuke Onitsuka, CGI Director of Digital Dpt. of Khara and General Manager of Production Dpt. of Studio Q, told about their situation.
[Onitsuka] "We need cooperative work with friend companies for our production. However, many of those companies are small or middle-sized, so if we stick to 3ds Max it will cause higher management costs. ... While we still have the challenge whether a new partner company can use Blender or not, but at least, cost-wise is much simpler, so we are proposing them to use Blender as we use it."
[...] [Takumi] Shigyo: "We are getting more artists that started by using Blender in Studio Q. We are also seeing more high quality works by Blender users from high school students in Award:Q. I expect these new generations to be the majority working at studios in the future."
https://www.blender.org/user-stories/japanese-anime-studio-khara-moving-to-blender/
(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Sunday August 18 2019, @01:50AM
I doubt they'll learn. Autodesk used to have a thriving 3rd party developer community until they deliberately annexed all the IP, and left the developers out in the cold. Not many people have forgotten that, so why would any community form around them again?
Whereas Blender is open source, and the community around it is thriving apparently. So much so, that a major studio is dumping a huge vendor just to be able to attract young talent and smaller organizations that can't afford Autodesk, but know how to use Blender.
Autodesk, and companies like it (Adobe), better see the writing on the wall. The older workforce is retiring, the younger workforce doesn't use them, and companies are starting to drop them.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.