Many years out of date (but from experience working with animation teams), Blender and other modeling tools were used by "creative" teams. They would build assets like the canonical version of the eponymous character for the production.

_Animators_ would then write the algorithms to animate said models within the studios chosen engine. For smaller studios this looks vaguely like integration on a service bus. At larger studios this would look more like "team X who writes a particle effects library which is then used to create snow" or "team Y who is making a kinematics extension and to inject the hundreds of slight nuances when a character jumps" (then a poser has tools to say "take Dinkey Donkey, move him from (x y,z) to (x',y',z') and have him jump".

Animation in video and gaming often looks like software development at this point (library management, shared objects, compiling frames, linking them into a video, etc).