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Random troll on the internet can't google? Here is one of many

yeah - and look where the success of this humble bundle has got THQ - they filed for bankruptcy protection in late 2012. The pc games industry is anything but healthy.
http://www.cgw.com/Press-Center/News/2012/THQ-In-Financial-Trouble.aspx#.UN6-AneeOAE

Everyone interested in indie games should sign up to computer graphics world and Game Developer mag. They give away subscriptions if you're a developer. You know, basically anyone who fills out their form. Their online articles are decent too.

One of the best features of Game Developer is the postmortem, the what went right, what went wrong. Fascinating stuff about the industry for an indie publisher or an outsider to read.

The Indie Games show off some of the best out there.

While there are some very good indie works out there it is like the movies. You can tell the difference between a hollywood movie and a indie film, just like a AAA game title and an indie title. Although there are enough gems in both indie movements to make it interesting.

Computer Graphics World
Advanced Imaging
National Geographic
The Stranger
Flagpole

See the cover story at Computer Graphics World for the full story. They use Alias for modeling, their own software for animation on SGIs and prMan for rendering on a giant pile of Suns.

Check out the most recent issue of Computer Graphics World and read their cover story.

Here are a few choice quotes:

Pixar uses Alias|Wavefront's (Toronto) Alias Studio for modeling, Interactive Effects' (Irvine, CA) Amazon Paint for painting, and a host of custom software for such tasks as modeling, animation, and compositing-all running on SGI machines. For rendering, the studio used its own RenderMan software running on Sun machines.

...and:

Pixar's renderfarm has now grown to 1400 processors and even so, Toy Story 2 pushed the studio's rendering capabilities to the limit. There are 122,699 frames in the movie, according to Thomas Jordan, render technical director (TD), who, with a team of 10 "render wranglers," herded final frames through the render pipeline. According to Jordan, the time it took to render each frame ranged from 10 minutes to three days, with frame sizes as large as 4gb. The fastest output was 930 feet of film, or 14,880 frames, in one week.

Loads more, and they talk with all the principles of the film, John Lasseter, Ed Catmull and the rest. Not too many spoilers, and the detail is great...for instance, the dust on the shelf Wheezy was on was NOT a particle system; it was actually discrete geometry. And the hairs on Al's arm were modeled as well.