According to The How-To Geek, the Oscar-winning animated feature “Flow” was made on a modest budget entirely within the open-source software Blender, beating out typical multi-million dollar studio projects. Despite this success, major Hollywood VFX and animation studios largely use Blender only for production-adjacent tasks like previsualization, not as their core tool. The primary obstacles are the massive, custom-built software pipelines studios have invested millions in over years, and the lack of immediate enterprise-level support that proprietary software vendors provide. In 2020, a potential solution emerged when Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, announced it would begin offering enterprise support for Blender. However, this support structure is still relatively new and unproven at the multi-million dollar production scale. Finally, studios that develop their own proprietary software face complications with Blender’s open-source licensing, which can require them to release their modifications back to the public.
The billion-dollar pipeline problem
Here’s the thing everyone outside the industry misses: studios aren’t just buying software off the shelf. They’re building entire ecosystems. An animation pipeline is a bespoke, interconnected machine of custom tools, plugins, and workflows that can represent a decade of development and hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s the studio’s secret sauce. Swapping out the core application would be like asking a Formula 1 team to replace their entire custom-designed car with a stock model, even a really good one, in the middle of a championship season. The retraining alone for hundreds of specialized artists and technicians would be a nightmare. So the question isn’t “Is Blender good?” It’s “Is Blender good enough to justify dismantling a billion-dollar machine?” For now, the answer is a resounding no.
Who’s gonna call at 3 AM?
Now, think about the support model. When Pixar or ILM has a render farm crash at 2 AM with a deadline looming, they need a vendor on the phone immediately who knows their exact setup inside and out. That’s what they pay insane licensing fees for. Blender’s community support model, as incredible as it is, doesn’t work that way. You can’t have a multi-thousand-person production waiting on a forum post. Canonical’s enterprise support deal is a huge step toward solving this, but it’s new. Trust in that kind of support is earned over years and across multiple crisis-free blockbusters. Studios with $200 million on the line aren’t going to be the first to test it.
The open-source double-edged sword
And then there’s the licensing. Blender is GNU GPL, which is great for sharing and community growth. But for a studio? It’s tricky. If they modify Blender’s core code to create some revolutionary rendering trick, the license can compel them to release those changes publicly. That’s a non-starter for companies whose competitive edge is their proprietary technology. They could try to work around it with external plugins, but it adds complexity and legal risk. So while a studio *could* hire developers to bend Blender to their will, the rules of engagement are fundamentally different—and often less appealing—than with a traditional commercial license.
Blender’s real play
So is Blender doomed to indie films and TV episodes? Not at all. Its strategy is just different. It’s playing the long game. Blender is cultivating the next generation of artists. A kid anywhere in the world can download it for free and become a master. New studios, unburdened by legacy pipelines and sunk costs, are starting with Blender as their foundation. They’re building their pipelines around it from day one. Basically, Blender isn’t trying to conquer Hollywood from the top down. It’s preparing to inherit it from the bottom up, one artist and one agile new studio at a time. The Oscar for “Flow” isn’t a fluke; it’s a preview.
