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Comment by dinkblam | Hacker News Reader

good explanation and i also wondered why many of the CGI effects today are so unbelievably bad - and worse than decades ago.

it still doesn't explain why it is done:

• why do directors and producers sign off effects that are just eye-bleeding bad?

• using a realtime engine to develop the effects, doesn't preclude using some real render-pass at the end to get a nice result instead of "game level graphics". a final render-pass can't be that expensive that ruining the movie is preferred? if 20 years ago a render-farm could do it, it cannot cost millions today, can it?

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The reason is it's a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to work with, and in general enables things to be done that would otherwise be cost prohibitive.

(And AFAIK they do usually do a non-realtime run, but a high-end render going for maximum photorealism also requires a whole different pipeline for modelling and rendering, which would essentially blow the budget even more so)

My thoughts:

- There's an order of magnitude more CGI in films than a decade ago, so even though the budget and tech is better, its spread way thinner

- With CGI it's easier to slip into excess, and too much stuff on the screen is just visual noise

- Practical effects/complex CGI require months of planning, as it must work or you blow the budget/miss the deadline - now you don't need to plan ahead so much, leading to sloppy writing/directing, as the attitude is that 'we can rework it'

- Movies used to have 1-2 epic scenes they spent most of the runtime building up to. Nowadays, each scene feels less memorable, because there's a lot more of it, and have less buildup

- 3D people don't have the skillsets for nailing a particular look. The person who's best at making gothic castle ruins, is probably not a 3D expert, this also goes the other way

>>and worse than decades ago.

I feel like there's some strong rose tinted glasses effect happening here. Early 2000s were especially full of absolutely dreadful CGI and VFX in almost every film that used them unless you were Pixar, Dreamworks, or Lucasfilms. I can give you almost countless examples of this.

The only thing that changed is that now it's easier than ever to make something on a cheap budget, but this absolutely used to happen 20-30 years ago too, horror CGI was the standard not an exception.

> • why do directors and producers sign off effects that are just eye-bleeding bad?

It's a bit cheaper.

> • using a realtime engine to develop the effects, doesn't preclude using some real render-pass at the end to get a nice result instead of "game level graphics".

It's probably a bit expensive in terms of effort or processing-wise.

In both cases you aren't ruining a movie. You're just making it more mediocre. People rarely leave cinema because CGI is mediocre.

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