Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

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I ran a vfx company before. Author clearly is just a hobbyist at best and has no experience in digital production.

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.

Yea the author insinuated that stock 3D libraries were also an advantage. Anyone who's worked in animation or video games knows you can't generally just grab a bunch of assets from a store and put them in a work and expect them to look like they belong to the same world. You're gunna have to do some shading work at the minimum.

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.

I will make a few speculations:

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.

Indeed. It looks like the author is only focusing on realtime rendering.

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.

Especially in long running anime series this is highly visible. They are often based on the manga as a source material. Eventually the anime will catch up with the manga and to avoid that the anime has to be stretched with "filler content".

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.

For many years, my stock answer to anyone who says that computers are "fast enough" or "more powerful than most people need" is that I will only be satisfied when I can create photorealistic movies by talking to my machine.

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.

Definitely not within the 5-10 year timeframe that the article quotes though... if a computer can follow completely open-ended instructions that well in a decade then we'll be living in an entirely new world, and making movies will frankly be the least of our concerns.

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