I know there’s a lot of people invovled in making those visual efects, and I know the equipment costs a lot, too. But when I near about film companies charging 30 mil a movie for all the effects I start to wonder exactly how that money cgets spent. ANy dopers know the real scoop?
CGI involves more than just importing the footage to a computer. The image needs to be properly set and staged prior to the addition of digital effects, which means green screens, which means lots and lots and lots of man-hours. Remember, union workers ain’t cheap.
At a S-F convention I attended, “Mojo,” the guy who did most of Babylon 5’s SFX, stated that with about an $8,500 investment in hardware and software, anyone talented can turn out CGI equal to the biggest houses out there. Without a render farm, getting anything useful would take a l-o-o-ng time to put out and that works into some serious money, but equipment costs are minimal otherwise.
What runs into the big bucks is the time. You’ve got bunches of talented people taking a long time to get anything accomplished. Imagine a couple hundred people at Weta Digital doing a year’s worth of work each to bring ROTK to the screen and you can see how the payroll costs mount up in a hurry.
DD
There are also a lot of ordinary artists using Poser to do some fairly fantastic stuff. It’s not just the animation, there are also people making and selling props for poser figures and movies: everything from wigs to clothes to bondage gear to entire motel rooms. Poser animations started out pretty crude, but the software keeps getting better and better. The latest Poser stuff (Poser 5) is fairly impressive – about on par or maybe a little better than what they had in the Final Fantasy movie.
Check out some of the downloads at the Poser website.
This tech has to be pretty cheap, since it’s sold as hobbyist software at least in part. Wouldn’t be surprised to see something incredible burble out of the Poser art community sooner or later. I’ve seen some pretty incredible bondage imagery at the former Thralldom site.
Don’t forget that cgi artists do get overtime. I remember reading that when they moved Titanic back from July 2 to December, that it saved some money as the effects artists wouldn’t have to be paid overtime.