[donutdan4114]

What’s the consensus on the future of this type of 3D tool? Especially for video animation/CGI in movies/tv/ads?

Seems like in 10 years AI will basically make it pointless to use a tool like this at least for people working on average projects.

What do folks in the industry think? What’s the long term outlook?

[simonask]

If you don’t work in the industry, you have zero chance of accurately evaluating whether or not, or how, it will be impacted by any new technology.

The fact that it “seems easy” is a great flag that it probably isn’t.

[Legend2440]

Industry has no idea how they’re going to be impacted either.

Really no one can predict the future.

[xu_ituairo]

This seems like an unnecessarily unkind response. The post you're replying to is sharing their opinion and asking what people who are in the industry think about it.

[simonask]

I think it's both arrogant and ignorant to make assumptions like that.

[NuclearPM]

Zero?

[cogman10]

Directors spend a LOT of effort trying to keep continuity and that's the weakest part of AI.

What blender and other CGI software gets for free is continuity. The 3D model does not change without explicitly making it change.

Until we get AI which can regenerate the same model from one scene to the next, the use of AI in CGI will be severely limited.

[john_minsk]

That's exactly what I think will happen. 3D is endgame for AI. 3D models are deterministic objects that provide continuity, while AI does non-deterministic abstract generation(thinking) + plans action plan for these 3d models.

Recent news on major AI scientists starting "world AI" companies confirm this trend.

So 3D soon will become a very important tech even compared to today.

[HumanOstrich]

"AI will make this pointless" is so exhausting.

[andrepd]

Can there please be one post on this godforsaken website where there is no attempt to shoehorn it into the AI craze?

[yokljo]

Oh you must think you are reading Hacker News, sorry about that, this is actually AI Optimism News.

[jamilton]

If AI is at the point where it is exactly as capable of your average junior 3D professional in 10 years, it will probably have automated a ton (double digit percentage?) of current jobs such that nothing is safe. There's a lot of complexity, it's fairly long time horizon, it's very visually detailed, it's creative and subjective, and there's not a lot of easily accessible high quality training data.

It's like 2D art with more complexity and less training data. Non-AI 2D art and animation tools haven't been made irrelevant yet, and don't look like they will be soon.

[croes]

Not quite. The junior produced also source filed that a senior can enhance. AI gives you the end result that can’t be as easy tinkered with.

[Uehreka]

I design projections for independent theatre in Baltimore. I use AI in my workflows where it can help me and won’t compromise on the quality of what I’m making. I frequently use AI to upscale crappy footage, to interpolate frames in existing video (for artistic purposes, never with documentary archival stuff) and very occasionally to create wholesale clips in situations where video models can do what I need.

I recently used WAN to generate a looping clip of clouds moving quickly, something that’s difficult to do in CGI and impossible to capture live action. It worked out because I didn’t have specific demands other than what I just said, and I wasn’t asking for anything too obscure.

At this point, I expect the quality of local video models (the only kind I’m willing to work with professionally) to go up, but prompt adherence seems like a tough nut to crack, which makes me think it may be a while before we have prosumer models that can replace what I do in Blender.

[crq-yml]

You will still need the tool but the interface to it may start to change.

A lot of the editing functions for 3D art play some role in achieving verisimilitude in the result - that it looks and feels believably like some source reference, in terms of shapes, materials, lights, motion and so on. For the parts of that where what you really want to say is "just configure A to be more like B", prompting and generative approaches can add a lot of value. It will be a great boost to new CG users and allow one person to feel confident in taking on more steps in the pipeline. Every 3D package today resembles an astronaut control panel because there is too much to configure and the actual productions tend to divvy up the work into specialty roles where it can become someone's job to know the way to handle a particular step.

However, the actual underlying pipeline can't be shortcut: the consistency built by traditional CG algorithms is the source of the value within CG, and still needs human attention to be directed towards some purpose. So we end up in equilibriums where the budget for a production can still go towards crafting an expensive new look, but the work itself is more targeted - decorating the interior instead of architecting the whole house.

[jacobgkau]

As someone who's actually used Blender for small video projects, I'm fairly confident you'll still need this type of tool even with AI assistance doing some of the work in it, especially for at least the next 10 years.

AI coding agents didn't make IDEs obsolete. They just added plugins to some existing IDEs and spawned a few new ones.

[bena]

You build apps for Shopify.

You are asking for industry predictions from industry professionals in an industry you know nothing about while assuming a lot about that industry.

Why do you think they should do all the heavy lifting for you?

You might as well ask ChatGPT what it thinks because it seems you already have an idea of what you want the answer to be.

[Razengan]

What will AI train on?

[amelius]

3D scans of the real world?

[jacobgkau]

I don't think the "what will it train on" argument is bullet-proof, but animation and 3D art can encompass so much more than just things that exist in the real world.

[nkrisc]

Famously, all 3D art is of things only found in the real world.

[john_minsk]

Real world might be boring, but very useful. Especially for companies that move boxes around, not fantasy characters.

[jacobgkau]

The topic was about a 3D art tool. What are "companies that move boxes around" using a 3D art tool for?