There seems to be this mis-conception that benefits to small freelancers are irrelevant to larger teams working on longer schedules and bigger volumes.
Of course the priorities of a place doing feature animation differ from those of one producing MMOs, to those of a high end TVC boutique like the Mill, to those of the individual hopping between 5 members rock-bands doing 30 seconds skits. That said, there are good reasons, and considerable advantages, that are shared across fields. If you look at something like brick-blur in the LEGO movie (objects becoming a streak made of bricks representing large, real world volume pixel equivalents past a certain velocity threshold) of course we could have done it in another app. Parts of it towards the very end of it in fact are in-house. But you know what? In the end it's practically a full rendering engine that includes sampling options, bias adjustment and all, and it was all done in ICE until the brick replacement and injection stage that represents maybe 20% of the final effect. Could I have done it in Maya? Yeah, I could, but for the same amount of time I would have had a polished but really slow solution that would have had mandatory flipbooks, instead of a 60fps brixel rendering engine running in the viewport for animators to tweak in real time with controls indistinguishable from the rig's own controls. Could I have got it to run to 60fps in Maya? Again, probably yes, but I would have had to manually and painfully write, tweak and debug some fairly involved thread management, instead of being able to simply re-commit an ICE graph that transparently updated for animators, and focus instead on the creative challenges of nailing the effect. In the end ICE was preferred to both Houdini and custom solutions that we had plenty knowledge and fire power to deal with had the need arisen. These things add up, and they add up to the reason why Softimage has survived in the rare film shop so long despite the added challenges of adopting a non mainstream software. I've seen people genuinely surprised when they learnt that all the animals in Life of Pi were handled by three riggers and one supervisor. Normally that quality and amount of work would require more than double that crew if you look at most credit rolls. Well, Walking with dinosaurs was done with an average staff of 3.5 riggers and one supervisor for its duration, and it had close to 20 unique species and dozens and dozens of rigs once variations and ages are considered, with 10 unique hero characters, and that's for a department that also took care of a lot of conceptual work, creative iterations, simulations, and was later migrated to take care of character FX. I think by the end of the project the whole rigging department hadn't made it to the 100 hours of overtime mark, and that's several people over two years. What do those have in common? Neither used Maya for rigging (Pi was Voodoo, not Soft, just in case people don't know) :p Had we used Maya several hundred hours worth of RnD and asset triage would have been added to the bid, and the team would have probably have had to be close to twice the size.
