Blender to spend two years focusing on the needs of small studios making feature-length animation

The Blender developers have laid out what they will work on over the next two years. In the article “Small Teams, Ambitious Projects” on the developer blog, Dalai Felinto, Blender's product lead, described the main goal: Blender should become a tool with which a small independent studio can make a long-form project, such as a feature-length animated film.

This goal is meant to unite the project's contributors. A preliminary list of six areas has been drawn up around it. The list will still be refined, and the developers are waiting for feedback from studios that work in Blender. Most of the items address problems a small team faces on a large project: the large amount of manual work for animators, the complexity of rigging for people without a technical background, several artists collaborating on the same asset, and managing complex scenes.

Six areas the team will focus on

• Dynamic overrides. This feature makes it possible to override property values on any data-block, whether linked or local. It has been in development for several years, but it still needs design refinement and thorough testing to be convenient to use.
• Animation drudgery. The developers acknowledge that animation remains a very labor-intensive process. Example tasks include improved key and curve filtering tools, layered animation, more convenient editing of keys and curves, and visualization tools: motion paths and onion skinning.
• Rigging for large projects. The team wants to build a more complete rigging system with predefined approaches so that character rigs can be assembled by users with little technical background. Many tools are currently missing, from simple metarig setup to an advanced modular framework for multiple characters. The developers may also explore interface tools such as on-model gizmos and bone picker panels.
• From storyboard to previs. The Video Sequence Editor can serve as a status-tracking system across all stages of a project, from script breakdown to final delivery. Example tasks include Story Tools Next: Board-to-Previs and Watchtower-style tracking of shot and sequence statuses.
• Collaborative asset work. Blender Studio is developing the Asset Pipeline add-on. It lets several artists synchronize their changes in a single asset file. The concept still needs refinement and a robust implementation. Plans include collaboration on a single character, primarily data exchange between modeling, rigging and surfacing, as well as tools for managing and assembling shots.
• Handling complex scenes. This block includes texture layers, texture painting and baking, a spreadsheet view of light sources and render passes, light linking from the perspective of the lit objects, scene performance metrics, and visualization of file dependencies and the dependency graph.

What remains outside the main goal

Besides the strategic tasks, the project continues research, module maintenance and other projects unrelated to the feature film. Felinto writes that with the current team size and funding forecasts, working on them in parallel should be possible. At the same time, he suggests thinking about how to bring more developers onto shared tasks so as not to spread efforts across too many directions. A clear agenda should also help external contributors: it shows why the team may not have time to review features that are not in the plans.

The article also lists other goals the team considers important: the use of Blender in game studios of all sizes up to AAA, in large animation and VFX pipelines, and in mechanical engineering, including the aerospace and automotive industries and industrial design. These goals may make it into the plans if time and resources allow, but the main goal remains work on long-form projects.

OVERGROWN to become a testing ground for new features

Blender Studio will put the new capabilities to the test in practice. The studio is working on the feature film OVERGROWN, its most ambitious project to date. The film will be made entirely in Blender, and the artists will work on daily builds and test the tools right as they are being developed. The studio also plans to release documentation and tutorials so that other filmmakers can apply this experience in their own projects.

The main characters of OVERGROWN are a raccoon and his hedgehog daughter. The visual style continues the studio's experiments with painterly NPR: gouache-like brushstrokes are combined with complex layers of atmospheric lighting. The studio has already shown a teaser of the film. Blender Studio needs the support of 7,000 people for stable funding, and according to the studio, this goal is 85% complete.

What this means for the industry

The chosen course continues a long-standing Blender practice. Open films have long helped test tools in real production, and Blender Studio has been a source of ideas for many features. A feature film likely places different demands: more shots, long-term work on the same assets, many people in one pipeline. Judging by the list of priorities, the developers want to close the gaps that prevent the package from being used at that scale.

This could help small animation studios and auteur teams the most, for whom commercial software licenses and maintaining a pipeline department make up a noticeable share of the budget. For game and engineering users, the changes will probably be less noticeable, since their tasks are not part of the main goal. If OVERGROWN makes it to release, independent studios will have a documented example of producing a feature film with open-source software. This could strengthen Blender's position as a primary tool for long-form projects.

Community reaction

On English-language X, the announcement went almost unnoticed: the official @Blender post collected dozens of likes, but there were almost no substantive replies or quotes. Japanese CG professionals reacted more actively: @kurono73's breakdown of the two-year goals spread to hundreds of likes and dozens of reposts. The overall tone is supportive and upbeat, with no outrage. Artists and technical specialists see the bet on small studios as a chance to make feature films with fewer resources and move away from Maya. The only doubts concern not the strategy itself but whether generative models might speed up development; the author of the original post objects: Blender has strict rules on such models, and the announced tasks were prepared for years — the foundation has already been laid, and now the main work is being tackled.

“I want to ditch Maya as soon as possible, so please don't let us down.”

— @houdiniotaku (X)

“A pretty hot announcement.”

— @Misaki_Akatsuki (X)

“Their policy on generative models is clear, and it's a community of people who write their own code, so, oddly enough, there's hardly any of that. What's described here was planned several years ago: the foundation is ready, and now they can finally take on the main work.”

— @kurono73 (X)

What is behind the Blender Foundation's choice: requests from sponsor studios, the growth of independent animation, or lagging behind Maya in the pipeline?