The Next Billion Dollar Disruption, Real Time Animation
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Studios aren't clueless, this is their business. They take advantage of every hardware upgrade, have already expanded into the cloud, and the bigger companies have direct R&D access to nvidia's engineers to develop the next generation. Everyone wants faster graphics and lower costs, and they already use real-time rendering everywhere, especially in editing.
Yes, better hardware has made it easier for more people to produce more things, as evidenced by the exploding world of Youtube creators making high-end productions. However there is an immense difference in overall quality between those videos (which can easily climb into 6 figure costs) and the big budget studio productions that fill cinemas.
Also graphics are a tiny part of the overall product. The rest is the creative process, building the actual scenes, and making it all look and feel right. There's no magic button to transfer your imagination into the computer, and that's the majority of the effort, along with actually coming up with a good story in the first place.
Unless you happen to make movies that share very similar styles, such as Pixar, which already has a massive digital library of assets they pull off the rack whenever they want.
Another thing to look at is "Smash and Grab", which is the original talk about an internal Pixar project to give a small team a really small budget and timeline, no bureaucracy, but access to Pixar tech, and make a quality short film, and it's doing pretty well.
1) ML algorithms will be able to adjust stock art to have a common look. Think MM fonts on steroids.
2) Common themes will develop in stock art libraries. In other words, I'll be able to pick a world, have a wide array of objects, and it will all fit together pretty well.
Will this be as good as a Hollywood-budget animation? Almost certainly not. Will this be good enough, given good plot and writing? I suspect so.
Will we see fifty different movies with the same-looking characters playing different roles? Almost certainly. It will be almost like having the same actor play Tarzan AND the Terminator AND a police officer.
Will we see animation well behind the state-of-the-art? Almost certainly. On the other hand, I'm perfectly okay watching cartoons from 50 years ago, and I think we can do much, much better.
I think the major problem right now is that to do a movie, you had to be competent at plot/writing, animation, distribution, voice acting, etc. That took a movie studio.
Digital platforms are already taking over distribution. Now, a group of five friends can make a high-impact video. As other parts of the channel get subsumed by advances in technology, eventually it will be down to one person in a room with a good idea. That will be transformative.
Yes, realtime rendering will save time and money but this will only be a fraction of the cost.
And realtime rendering of complex scenes is still some years away.
Producing an anime series requires a far far bigger team and is significantly more expensive than a manga so why is this happening in the first place? Why can't they just add more people to work on the manga? The artists are not the bottleneck. The authors of the story are the bottleneck. They have to come up with an original story and this is not the type of problem where adding more people helps.
The session could go something like this:
Create a scene: London docks, around 1919, mid-afternoon. There are a few ships being offloaded, crates stacked around, trucks and horse carts transporting freight.
<scene is created based on historical photos, ML readings of period books, etc.>
OK make it grimer, more soot on everything. And make the season wintertime. Add more stevedores. Ship in the foreground is red, weathered, and flying a German flag.
<changes are made to the scene>
OK pull back and add a pub on the right side of the screen. Let's make it dusk. Sun is setting. Get some good light spill when the door of the pub is opened.
<scene updates>
Let's work on the pub's sign. It's called the Red Swan. Make a sign carved in the shape of a swan, paint it red. Smaller, and let the wood show through where some of the paint is weathered away. Hang it over the door.
<scene updates>
etc.
This should all become possible eventually, and probably a lot sooner than many people think.
But I think my take after reading this is what he sees as a bomb that's waiting to go off is in reality a gradual evolution that literally everyone in animation/film sees coming. I have spoken to a bunch of people in the space, and have been in the space myself, and have run into absolutely no one that is a non-believer (like the people who doubted the iPhone would take off, for example).
Also let's be real here, we are talking about entertainment art here, and from what I've seen, most people suck at telling stories. Cost hasn't really been a barrier for a long time with low-cost, damn good cameras and free distribution platforms like Youtube. Hell, the pilot used to pitch It's Always Sunny in Philidelphia was famously recorded on a home camcorder. People don't go from distributing their own stuff to pitching studios for technology resources they don't have access to, they do it for the marketing machines and higher-revenue distribution channels. The up-level in quality is just a bonus if you have a good story.
What people like this don’t realize is the degree to which every iota of detail in a Disney (Pixar, Dreamworks, Sony, etc) production is art directed and stylized. Every shot is cheated to camera (meaning the poses don’t necessarily read well in 3D, but look spectacular/have clear posing to the locked camera), at least to some degree. That’s why these movies are so fun to watch. Even something like Rick and Morty has stylized animation and it’s own particular motion language. To think you could replicate this with generic asset libraries and motion capture is beyond ignorant.
It’s particularly frustrating as somebody who once was a professional animator to hear this guy talking about how this technology will revolutionize the field, casually mention that he was “considering becoming a professional animator” - and then you look at his work and he has such limited knowledge of the craft. It belittles those who have devoted their lives into mastering this deep skill.
One of the hallmarks of a disruptive technology is that it's crap compared to what the entrenched technology does. Not just seems like crap, but really significantly worse by any objective standard.
So you are 100% correct in your assessment, and at the same time very possibly missing the point.
If you've never seen Red Vs Blue before, check out this scene:
Less about raw power, more about specialization. There is a lot of room still in specialization. In graphics, with things like ray-tracing, and in AI with things like the TPUs.
CPUs have risen in transistor count too, they just use the transistors to speed up serial general purpose computations as much as possible.
Moore's law is not about benchmarks.
That was from 1995. https://www.wired.com/1995/12/new-hollywood/
To my amateur eyes, it looks superb, and better than many demos in terms of the sync/accuracy of the facial expression and speech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i51CizUXd7A
It's also quite charming and amusing. Here's a background article, explaining the approach.
https://uploadvr.com/iphone-xsens-performance-capture-bebylo...
Yes, the cost of producing quality content will drop drastically. Yes, local improv groups will start making epic space operas and detailed historical reenactments.
One thing didn't get mentioned - interactivity. If you're creating content in real time, you can customize it to specific audience. You can respond to audience questions, give more screen time to favoured character and even alter the plot based on voting. What about crowd-sourced animated content?
The technology is already good enough (check Adobe Character Animator), but we sill need a good digital theatre software.
That said, the results are still quite far from studio CG animation. I wonder whether the market for cheaply produced animation is really as large as the author thinks. I think he's underestimating the primary value add of studios, which is marketing and distribution.
Are you all in on Nvidia? Are there any shops using AMD? Every Game / FX needs to mention they partner with Nvidia and I have yet to read much professional uses on Radeon. I understand for Data Science and Machine learning it is all CUDA, and likely won't change any time soon. But even for Graphics AMD doesn't seems to be doing well in professional space.
Render farms are different, and still CPU driven because of software and memory. AMD cpus will probably get more use in render farms for the price/performance, but then GPUs are also getting better at stretching memory and running other software, which might eventually switch rendering pipelines to be GPU driven.
This is a useful technology for creators, but probably not mass market.
The change will be larger and even more unexpected to the people who are currently expecting it. It will be larger than even I can imagine.
Everyone in this thread can't see the forest for the trees. Tell me a story ...