Quote:
Originally Posted by KrisKross
Yep. The CGI effects for Sandman reportedly put the film $100 million over budget. They took two years to develop.
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Okay, here's where I disagree. Back in the 90s Microsoft's Soft Image software was THE software for doing CGI. My pal Tony was the #1 salesman and part of the developement team for Soft Image. Tony literally developed the first well done CGI cartoon character and we worked on that thing for a year.
I remember when the hardware was Silicon Graphics hardware costing $50k and the software was $20k so in order to seat someone it cost a minimum of $50k. Tony and Microsoft used to send out that software and hardware for free for tax purposes for schools and non profits and churches. Then when I was about to seat 30 of my students with the software the hardware in general got better via desktops. Didn't need Silicon Graphics anymore. Price of the software dropped drastically. That continued for a whole nother year.
Nowadays the average desktop has more computing power than what was used on Jurassic Park. They used to send people to classes that cost like $1k an HOUR to learn software like Soft Image and Photoshop back in the day.
We saw the cost of using CG as dropping like a rock as the software options like MAYA and other CG programs came into play and with bigger badder hardware.
Nope.
Costs are going up and there's no fucking reason for it except perhaps competency and artistic finesse. You can see it in a lot of adult websites that use CG. 99% of them look exactly the same. Stiff figures etc.. However every once in a while one guy will have some CG toons that look real good.
You can see some real crappy CG on some tv commercials the best CGI is the stuff you didn't even know was CGI.
The program menus we have to work on as they make the Photoshop menu look like toy alphabet blocks. You wouldn't believe how unnessesarily complicated some programmers can make a program! The more complicated the system the more time the learning curve.
Now the CGI programs are so advanced that we end up back to square one, you have to have some artistic good old fashioned drawing skills and painting skills and storytelling skills to stand out above the crowd.
If the success curve has gotten that distant then the top CGI guys can call for high end money. That's good news for me and my guys though! Especially with the new tools for doing what's called squash and stretch animation and other old fashioned techniques to new end techniques.