Yes, almost everything is made in blender except for some textures which were painted in Substance Painter and volumetric effects like explosions which were generated in FumeFX and Houdini before being imported, rendered and composited in blender.
That was pretty cool. Thank you! I wish they talked a little more about the difficulties they faced and how they solved them. If I remember correctly Ton Roosendaal once said one of the purposes of the Blender Open Movie project is to showcase the Blender is capable of handling complex large projects. After 4 open movie project it must have matured enough that Tangent Animation was able to solve most of their problems themselves! Awesome!
My kids went wild for Next-Gen, I had no idea it was done in Blender! The graphics are first-class, really impressive stuff. I'm an amateur, but I couldn't tell it apart from other studios such as Pixar.
Cycles (Blender's built in path tracer) with some modifications. (Cryptomattes are now in 2.8, and the Embree patch will be integrated somewhere after.)
"Yes, cycles was used for everything, though our version of cycles was modified (with stefan's embree core, and crypto-mattes which were beyond valuable for compositing). The version of blender we used was the studios own dev version (which I believe was using blender 2.78 as it's base?)"
