You may not care, and you don't have to, but certainly it means a lot to the Blender Foundation, who for 23 years have been actively working on something free & open-source, and now finally it is in the big leagues.
Just as Flow's win looks even more impressive when you look at the films it competed against, who produced them, and what resources they had, Blender has been a project competing for parity and to be taken seriously while remaining totally free, and going up against systems that are either wildly expensive or not available outside the studio that made it at all.
Flow is not good because it was made with Blender, but Blender is proven to be very good and in that top echelon because Flow was made with it. For those who make or use Blender, this is big. Those folks have already believed for years/decades that Blender was great and serious, but now a lot more people outside that circle will know this, too.
Look, I am in no way trying to diminish work developers put in Blender. It is great product. I saw videos made in Blender that looks way better than Flow from the tech point of view.
My point was that the value of Flow is in its story, both written and visual and far overshadows any technical aspect. Avatar for example is totally opposite from that point of view in my opinion. Great graphics and absolutely meh, story.
And the value of Blender (or any 3D rendering software) is not only the fidelity of the rendered result, but the tools it gives artists to transform their vision into something that can be rendered by a computer.
The point is that this amazing story could be produced, as a finished movie, by a team that only needed to raise about $3M. Precisely how much of that is because they used Blender is still not clear to me, but the importance of Blender's use here is that it opens the door to equivalently great (or even better!) story telling on (relatively) low budgets ($3M is still a lot to raise, it seems to me). This story would never have been made if it needed $30M or $300M to make.
>" but the importance of Blender's use here is that it opens the door to equivalently great (or even better!) story telling on (relatively) low budgets"
I agree that what they have achieved for "only $3M" is nothing but amazing. I have no idea how much money was saved by using Blender.
Just as Flow's win looks even more impressive when you look at the films it competed against, who produced them, and what resources they had, Blender has been a project competing for parity and to be taken seriously while remaining totally free, and going up against systems that are either wildly expensive or not available outside the studio that made it at all.
Flow is not good because it was made with Blender, but Blender is proven to be very good and in that top echelon because Flow was made with it. For those who make or use Blender, this is big. Those folks have already believed for years/decades that Blender was great and serious, but now a lot more people outside that circle will know this, too.