Is Blender used by the props team, and how far has it been implemented into your pipeline, or are you using 3ds Max like a pleb?
TL;DRThe props team still uses 3ds Max (weapons use Maya), because the existing scripts, custom exporter, and retraining costs make Blender impractical for daily production, though some concept artists use it.
We are definitely still very pleb-like in our use of 3ds Max. I'll put it this way. There's a lot of artists who are very enthusiastic about Blender and would love to use it on a day-to-day basis. However, and this is just my personal opinion, we have a massive library of scripts and also a custom exporter for our engine, and obviously all of that would need to be ported over before it was something we could consider. I'm not sure how the tool programmers feel about that; probably they're like, 'nah, mate.' So there are artists who are very passionate about the use of Blender. I'm not one of them, I'm still a knuckle-dragging idiot, but I would love to learn to use Blender, I just don't really have time at the moment. But yeah, basically not right now. Some of the concept artists use Blender and they take advantage of the fact it's got its own PBR engine to present stuff. It's a very nice workflow for them as a production workflow without massive amounts of work from tools programmers. I couldn't see it being used day to day.
I'm sure there's also the element of a learning curve for production artists as well. Take a week out of one person's schedule, it's cool. Take a week out of 200 artists' schedules, and all of a sudden you've got a reasonable amount of delays in that.
It's a bit like when people say, why aren't you using a different game engine? And it's like, well, the amount of resources we've invested into our workflows make it very challenging to make such a drastic pivot. I'm sure people will still ask about it though. They're still basically saying, we're interested in this tool or in this program. Personally, I don't see it coming in. But that's not to say there's any reason other than that. It would just take a lot of time for programmers.
On weapons, we usually use Maya, which is also a struggle. If you come from Max to Maya, you need to learn a lot. The same thing would apply for Blender. So if one person has a Blender file and the other person needs to work in that file, they would also need to know the software. And training people and so on, that takes a lot of time. And as Corey said, all the tools need to be converted to the other software, and people need to know everything about it and all the little tricks. And getting one file from one software to the other causes a lot of problems, especially if you consider animations, rigging and so on. And yeah, that's the whole reason behind it, I would say.