[mooki]

Video games are there today -- computers and mocap rigs all the way down. Still they are approaching hollywood movies in terms of budget. Tangled and Avatar are some of the most expensive movies of all time.

There are no shortcuts to that level of polish. Doesn't matter how advanced your rendering is, you still need an army of 3D artists. Makeup isn't going to be much cheaper just because you do it in Maya.

[learc83]

Avatar and Tangled were both pioneers of new technology of course they were expensive, but there are amateur fan effects better than those from multi-million dollar movies and TV shows 15-20 years ago. And the games of 10-15 years ago can be made a couple of people on a shoestring budget. I expect that trend to continue.

>Makeup isn't going to be much cheaper just because you do it in Maya.

They won't use Maya. Technology progresses, and tools become easier to use. At some point in the future you'll be able to select an actor, click makeup and adjust some sliders.

>you still need an army of 3D artists

For original creations you do need artists (the tools will continue to improve and make each artist more efficient), but there will come a time when all you'll need to do is take a few photos of tree, or a building to make an ultra high quality 3d model of it.

[mooki]

But to take that photo you still need to find the perfect tree or building, then drag some cameras out and take pictures of it. Then once it's uploaded, set up light and do some manual adjusting because that branch is just a few degrees off. And that's just one tree or building, you need thousands for a movie.

Indie movies will upload their back yard or buy stock trees, and it will show. That's what separates big budget from small budget - perfectionism and meticulous attention to the tiniest details. Computers doesn't understand beauty or emotion, so you need fine grained human control every step of the way.

It's the composition that is expensive and not the ability to perfectly reproduce reality.

[jiggy2011]

Entirely agree, if you watch any artist or musician work, the amount of attention paid to detail is astonishing.

It's the same as when a programmer will constantly re-factor their code to provide better abstractions or improve efficiency. Or when a designer spends hours deciding on how to a lay an interface out.

The tools to create generic copy-paste movies and music are already out there in the same way you can build a website by buying something from template monster and copy pasting a bunch of Javascript and PHP that you found on google around.

Of course tools will get better and make efficiency better but all that will do is raise the bar. People want to see movies that will wow them , either with better special effects than they have seen before or with clever/funny dialogue etc.

The people who have the skills to do this best will want to work for the big media companies because these are the ones who will open their wallets and pay them a good salary to do what they love all day with the best tools available.

[learc83]

>Computers doesn't understand beauty or emotion, so you need fine grained human control every step of the way.

That's were your wrong. Computers don't understand beauty, but given enough processing power, and sample data they can recreate it.

There's already a program that can listen to Beethoven and reproduce something that even experts can't tell he didn't write.

A movie example: In your movie creator you set up a scene with 2 people talking in a room. The computer has been trained with thousands of such scenes, so it automatically selects the best camera angles and allows the operator some manual control. That will happen at some point.