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From: dhelrod@cup.portal.com (David Hunter Elrod)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: state of the business
Message-ID: <21680@cup.portal.com>
Date: 29 Aug 89 20:48:14 GMT
References: <4690@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 30

> Is the entertainment computer graphics business increasing, decreasing, or
> reshuffling?  Someone stated that Digital Pictures, one of the first Cray-X
> customers, gave up the ghost some time ago.  Also, I haven't seen many long
> computer generated sequences in films such as TRON or The Last Starfighter
> recently.  Technique is continually improving as evidenced in this year's
> SIGGRAGH clips, so that can't be the problem.  The new RenderMan Companion
> book describes how ILM did Abyss special effects.  Some were so real that I
> thought they were model-based rather than computer generated.  At least the
> special effects people got top billing in the credits.

I've heard at least two producers comment that two of the biggest concerns
when making a movie are:
	1) What wizzy techno tricks will catch the public eye.
	2) The cost/time tradeoff.

When the image the computer generates looks "just like reality" where
reality might include models, or traditional tricks, the company falls
directly into #2 and picks the cheapest and/or fastest technique.  Thus,
usually only "impossible any other way" types of scenes get done on the
computer.

Although the cost of generating computer images is dropping, and companies
are moving facilities in-house, there is still a huge time investment.
Modeling and rendering are still a long way "time-wise" from being
cheap production tools.

David H. Elrod
Rivendell
415/968-3754
dhelrod@cup.portal.com