[meisenhus]

As impressive as this looks (and is), the effort strikes me as monumentally oversized. This particular picture, with its straight lines and everything artificial, could have just as well come out of a renderer. For substantially less cost, the result would have been the same.

Doesn't mean you don't need to have the creative vision first. But executing it with a camera and a light/laser/fog set and all the effort that went into it, seriously, just take a talented vfx artist and you get the same result.

It's different with nature photography and especially with humans. But there was nothing natural with this image.

[kuro_neko]

I'm reminded of the recent Steam Deck OLED video. It's obviously something that could be done with VFX, but I thought it was really cool.

I think this is similar. Just like in movies, there are directors who don't use VFX as much as they could...

[dag11]

I work with the folks who built that! It truly was months of giddy passion on their part[1]. And it was such a joy to see in person.

Disclosure: I might not have worked on The Orb but I do work on Steam Deck and other projects at Valve.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/593110/view/41180511...

[dag11]

That's like saying why should anyone at all make music, art, hire actors, etc., when A.I. will be able to do all of these tasks identically over the next couple years (partially already).

The human element is important. Because we're humans.

[aniviacat]

Once AI is capable of delivering similar quality, many musicians and actors will indeed be replaced.

But until this technology exists, musicians and actors will continue being employed.

[pompino]

The final image is shaped by a variety of people observing live changes to the scene and giving inputs. You can't iterate as quickly when you're interrupted constantly by the artist having to modify the scene and then render it. I'm sure you would have made a nice looking image using a digital scene, but I don't think you can duplicate the experience. It would not have been the same creative atmosphere.

[autoexec]

I'm pretty sure it'd be far faster for a team of people to view various options on a screen while an artist moved virtual lights around and played with colors and lens flair effects in a computer than it would be to wait around while people set up and move around various lasers and projectors and smoke machines between attempts and then looked at a screen to see how the camera picked it up.

[pompino]

No, it certainly isn't. Creating renders and scene modelling is definitely not real-time. Teams do markups and sketches for brainstorming.

[guitarlimeo]

But that's exactly what's interesting with this! Everything can't just be viewed through the lens of costs, the effort to make something unnatural like this in real life is part of the art itself.

If you're just looking at the end result, yeah, same result could've been achieved with VFX with a lot less costs, but it also wouldn't have as much value.

[hulitu]

> As impressive as this looks (and is), the effort strikes me as monumentally oversized

Like a lot of things in Windows (Taskbar, Settings): Measure with a micrometer, draw with a pencil, cut with an axe. /s