Receiving a lot of funding from tech companies is not synonymous with being widely used within the M&E industry (can't speak for other industry verticals). That's on the studios and artists, not funders. Being an industry standard requires a certain level of entrenchment/integration/mindshare that Blender does not have yet.
it also mean having high end plugins and integrating well with other industry-standard tools. That doesn't matter for home/amateurs users because you can't afford these tools anyway, but it does for studios.
Blender has been showing up in more and more professional studios, particularly in the gaming and media segments - I think it's still pretty rare in the ArchViz space.
Blender isn't THE industry standard by any means, but I don't think it would be a stretch to call it an industry standard. EA uses it for a lot of their concept work, Ubisoft uses it for their animation studio, it's the modelling tool at Infinity Ward, etc.
From what I have read and people I've spoken with, the games industry definitely uses Blender the most out of Games, VFX/Anim, and ArchViz. But the latter two, not so much out of isolated pockets, and usually nothing past the modeling phase. I'm coming from the studio VFX/Anim side, so I'm biased in that regards to my viewpoint in adoption.
Being funded by tech companies doesn't make it industry standard. For one...the tech companies aren't the industry to begin with.
It definitely is a strong show of support for Blender, but there aren't a lot of studios in the industry using Blender, so it's quite far from being anything like a standard yet.
My sources are that I am very involved in the 3D industry groups.
Blender is gaining ground, yes, but most studios are very much Maya based still with Blender used sparingly.
The one major Blender studio (Tangent) has also shuttered and were mid moving away from Blender at the time. I think the next biggest users of Blender are a division within Ubisoft, but it's not the primary DCC for Ubisoft in it's entirety either.
Where Blender is gaining most traction is freelance artists and people who don't need to work with a pipeline. Blender is slowly getting better for Pipeline integration, but it really doesn't like to play well yet within a studio where you're dealing with many different artists working on a shot, in possibly multiple DCCs.
As an anecdote, I installed GIMP for my son 6 years ago, who is now going to college to be a graphics designer. He did all of his digital artwork in GIMP and Krita, now Blender as well, for the whole length of that time.
He now has to use Photoshop for his classes. There are some tools in it he is impressed with but overall doesn’t care for Photoshop at all.
I want to use blender and I'm sure they would get a lot more acceptance if they fix the one thing people have been complaining about for YEARS! That's great for your son but no credible agency will use GIMP. Krita is awesome and I love it and comes the closest to an open source alternative to PS, it is much better than GIMP in everyway and is actually usable.
Unfortunately the industry doesn't care if he doesn't care about photoshop, it cares about it and if he wants to be a part of it he should start learning to care unless his work is beyond amazing and he will only be freelancing then ignore everything I said.
Photoshop is not impressive but it gets the job done quickly and smoothly with minimal friction and that's why it is number one.
Would you mind elaborating on what complaints you mean? Blender has had multiple major UI overhauls in the past few years, and changed a lot of basic command assignments in the process. They even moved selection from the right mouse button to the left button. That was the #1 complaint I used to hear all the time from everyone, and it was resolved a couple years ago. So I’m very curious what you’re referring to, and whether you’ve used it recently.
The industry complains plenty about Adobe cloud and the lock in of their products. They strongly need a competitor. Pipelining is a problem because designers rarely are experts for digital formats, but when more people switch, this is a temporary inconvenience.
Much appreciated of course!