There’s lots of small shops transitioning to Blender or using Blender. The studio that makes A Man in A high Castle VFX used Blender and there’s some animation

There’s lots of small shops transitioning to Blender or using Blender. The studio that makes A Man in A high Castle VFX used Blender and there’s some animation studios in Spain using Blender. The reason why it’s not used more: as good as it is Blender is still not Maya or Cinema 4D. Each 3D application has its own strengths and Maya has a LOT of tools that are application specific and that other applications might struggle to copy because they are so intertwined into its UX/UI and of course lots of proprietary R&D. There’s also the question of pipeline - .fbx file format is the standard in the industry and for good or for bad it’s ruled by Autodesk afaik. Other applications have to adversarially replicate it (i think?) a bit like .doc files going onto iWork And on your comment of having employees working on Blender - I believe Disney has a few people who contribute to Blender. But lots of the other applications like Maya and Katana are also extensible and studios like ILM have extensively modified Maya and others so to answer your question - they do extend other applications like Maya, Katana and NUKe and they have people on staff working on those extensions. The thing those extensions or plugins turn out to often be excellent competitive advantage against other studios so it’s actually helpful to keep them in house. All the big VFX studios have multiple proprietary technologies that they don’t share them with anyone at all - unless it becomes advantageous to sell it to others, in which try often spin it off or sell it to The Foundry.