In nuce: The Blender Foundation has reversed its decision to no longer follow the VFX Reference platform. This is according to a report on cgchannel.com.
In toto: The Blender Foundation had previously announced in a blog post by Blender Development Coordinator Dalai Felinto on 4 February this year that it would no longer be aligning itself with the platform. The reasons given for this were that the platform was neither conducive to integrating Blender into larger studios nor to facilitating the further development of Blender.
According to CGChannel, the decision was reversed after criticism was voiced within the visual effects industry (including from well-known employees of ILM or Animal Logic). According to these critical voices, some of which spoke anonymously, the effects of platform support for Blender were much more positive than Dalai’s blog post suggested. According to the critics, the decision to align with the VFX Rerence platform was a success for Blender, resulting in many VFX houses using – and still using – Blender.
With the return to the platform, the Blender Foundation wants to make all upcoming Blender versions in 2023 and 2024 fully compatible with the VFX Reference platform, as reported by CGChannel. The current Blender, i.e. version 3.3, can also be set up to be compatible with the platform.
What is the VFX Reference platform? It was launched by the Visual Effects Society in 2014 with the aim of making it easier for different software solutions used by VFX houses to work together. Every year, the platform is used to define specifications that are relevant to Visual Effects pipelines (e.g. regarding file formats, data exchange standards).
Sources: Blog posting by Dalai Felinto from 27.09.2022, Blog posting by Dalai Felinto from 4.02.2022, message on CGChannel.com. The lead image of this news item comes from the sci-fi short film Tears of Steel, created with the support of Blender.
