Pixar is still battling with lots of legacy cruft. They went through a phase of hiring the best and brightest directly from MIT and the like.
This resulted in an explosion of tools written in odd ways with obscures languages each with their own odd DSL to interact with. (Something that most VFX houses that survived the late 90s/early 00s suffer from.)
Part of the reason that Rhythm and Hues went bankrupt is that they were the last bastion of "we make all our own tools"
The battle Pixar had to rebuild/replace marionette cost millions and took years. It got so bad they were seriously considering Maya instead. (I thought they had actually bitten the bullet and bought a sight license, however it appears that they wrote presto instead.)
So Pixar isn't the chocolate factory of awesome it used to be. The long hours and the rampant wage fixing somewhat tarnishes the image.
This resulted in an explosion of tools written in odd ways with obscures languages each with their own odd DSL to interact with. (Something that most VFX houses that survived the late 90s/early 00s suffer from.)
Part of the reason that Rhythm and Hues went bankrupt is that they were the last bastion of "we make all our own tools"
The battle Pixar had to rebuild/replace marionette cost millions and took years. It got so bad they were seriously considering Maya instead. (I thought they had actually bitten the bullet and bought a sight license, however it appears that they wrote presto instead.)
So Pixar isn't the chocolate factory of awesome it used to be. The long hours and the rampant wage fixing somewhat tarnishes the image.