[gmueckl]

Kudos to blender's marketing team. They get a bit of free money from this. But the true motive for Epic and Unisoft is likely an attempt to strong-arm Autodesk into providing better support and maintainance. Dissatisfaction with Autodesk lack of care for their DCC tools has been growing for a very long time now, but studios also have a huge investment into these tools as parts of their proprietary pipelines. Expect Autodesk to kowtow soon and make sure that none of these companies will make the switch. If it means that Autodesk actually delivers bugfixes for the version the customer has instead of one or two releases down the road, it is a good outcome for the studios.

[sangnoir]

Blender is replacing an in-house tool, not software licensed from Autodesk. You might have missed the following section from the article

"We decided to transform a workflow centered on in-house software to a more agile development environment supported by open source and inner source solutions. This way, our research and development and pipeline teams could focus their energy on bringing innovative ideas to the table, while working closely with the creatives.

In that new workflow, Blender is replacing our in-house digital content creation tool."

[knd775]

This still feels like a warning to Autodesk. They are replacing what they already can with Blender, and investing the money required to get it to where it needs to be in order to fit their other workflows.

[electricslpnsld]

I don’t think Autodesk cares! Pixar bailed on Maya and Autodesk still put Maya on life support (and laid off the Maya R&D team). If arguably the biggest actor in the animation game doesn’t get Autodesk’s attention, why would Ubisoft?