
The Next Billion Dollar Disruption, Real Time Animation - aparashk
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/the-next-billion-dollar-disruption-you-read-about-it-here-first.html
======
manigandham
I ran a vfx company before. Author clearly is just a hobbyist at best and has
no experience in digital production.

Studios aren't clueless, this is their business. They take advantage of every
hardware upgrade, have already expanded into the cloud, and the bigger
companies have direct R&D access to nvidia's engineers to develop the next
generation. Everyone wants faster graphics and lower costs, and they already
use real-time rendering everywhere, especially in editing.

Yes, better hardware has made it easier for more people to produce more
things, as evidenced by the exploding world of Youtube creators making high-
end productions. However there is an immense difference in overall quality
between those videos (which can easily climb into 6 figure costs) and the big
budget studio productions that fill cinemas.

Also graphics are a tiny part of the overall product. The rest is the creative
process, building the actual scenes, and making it all look and feel right.
There's no magic button to transfer your imagination into the computer, and
that's the majority of the effort, along with actually coming up with a good
story in the first place.

~~~
carlosdp
Yea the author insinuated that stock 3D libraries were also an advantage.
Anyone who's worked in animation or video games knows you can't generally just
grab a bunch of assets from a store and put them in a work and expect them to
look like they belong to the same world. You're gunna have to do some shading
work at the minimum.

Unless you happen to make movies that share very similar styles, such as
Pixar, which already has a massive digital library of assets they pull off the
rack whenever they want.

Another thing to look at is "Smash and Grab", which is the original talk about
an internal Pixar project to give a small team a really small budget and
timeline, no bureaucracy, but access to Pixar tech, and make a quality short
film, and it's doing pretty well.

~~~
gibba999
I will make a few speculations:

1) ML algorithms will be able to adjust stock art to have a common look. Think
MM fonts on steroids.

2) Common themes will develop in stock art libraries. In other words, I'll be
able to pick a world, have a wide array of objects, and it will all fit
together pretty well.

Will this be as good as a Hollywood-budget animation? Almost certainly not.
Will this be good enough, given good plot and writing? I suspect so.

Will we see fifty different movies with the same-looking characters playing
different roles? Almost certainly. It will be almost like having the same
actor play Tarzan AND the Terminator AND a police officer.

Will we see animation well behind the state-of-the-art? Almost certainly. On
the other hand, I'm perfectly okay watching cartoons from 50 years ago, and I
think we can do much, much better.

I think the major problem right now is that to do a movie, you had to be
competent at plot/writing, animation, distribution, voice acting, etc. That
took a movie studio.

Digital platforms are already taking over distribution. Now, a group of five
friends can make a high-impact video. As other parts of the channel get
subsumed by advances in technology, eventually it will be down to one person
in a room with a good idea. That will be transformative.

------
carlosdp
So like, studios and FX shops like Pixar and ILM are very much aware of these
techniques, because they are leaders in them (they closely partner with Nvidia
on things like the super impressive real-time raytracing of the RTX GPUs, for
example), and they develop prototypes and working production applications of
these things. The technology to replicate cinema-quality graphics at lower
cost has existed for a while, at pretty much consumer-level costs in-fact (if
you know what you are doing). But if you have $100m to spend, you're gunna
spend it to keep ahead of what is already possible.

But I think my take after reading this is what he sees as a bomb that's
waiting to go off is in reality a gradual evolution that literally everyone in
animation/film sees coming. I have spoken to a bunch of people in the space,
and have been in the space myself, and have run into absolutely no one that is
a non-believer (like the people who doubted the iPhone would take off, for
example).

Also let's be real here, we are talking about entertainment art here, and from
what I've seen, most people suck at telling stories. Cost hasn't really been a
barrier for a long time with low-cost, damn good cameras and free distribution
platforms like Youtube. Hell, the pilot used to pitch It's Always Sunny in
Philidelphia was famously recorded on a home camcorder. People don't go from
distributing their own stuff to pitching studios for technology resources they
don't have access to, they do it for the marketing machines and higher-revenue
distribution channels. The up-level in quality is just a bonus if you have a
good story.

------
piazz
Yeah I don’t think this author has any idea what he’s talking about. His
argument basically is that real-time animation and motion capture will, what,
replace what Disney and Pixar are doing?

What people like this don’t realize is the degree to which every iota of
detail in a Disney (Pixar, Dreamworks, Sony, etc) production is art directed
and stylized. Every shot is cheated to camera (meaning the poses don’t
necessarily read well in 3D, but look spectacular/have clear posing to the
locked camera), at least to some degree. That’s why these movies are so fun to
watch. Even something like Rick and Morty has stylized animation and it’s own
particular motion language. To think you could replicate this with generic
asset libraries and motion capture is beyond ignorant.

It’s particularly frustrating as somebody who once was a professional animator
to hear this guy talking about how this technology will revolutionize the
field, casually mention that he was “considering becoming a professional
animator” - and then you look at his work and he has such limited knowledge of
the craft. It belittles those who have devoted their lives into mastering this
deep skill.

~~~
mpweiher
This is what professional typesetters (etc.) said when these ridiculous DTP
machines came around.

One of the hallmarks of a _disruptive_ technology is that it's _crap_ compared
to what the entrenched technology does. Not just seems like crap, but really
significantly worse by any objective standard.

So you are 100% correct in your assessment, and at the same time very possibly
missing the point.

------
Jedi72
This isn't disruptive, it's evolutionary at best. Red vs Blue was a successful
web series 15? years ago, made entirely from screen recordings from Halo 1.
Look up "Machinema". As others have pointed out, lack of truly great
artists/inspiration seems like the biggest barrier to producing entertainment.
Look at season 1 of South Park - good content beats flashy trimmings every day
of the week.

If you've never seen Red Vs Blue before, check out this scene:

[https://youtu.be/9BAM9fgV-ts](https://youtu.be/9BAM9fgV-ts)

~~~
swerner
They used Halo only in the very beginning, they switched to more traditional
tools: [https://www.smithmicro.com/company/news-room/press-
releases/...](https://www.smithmicro.com/company/news-room/press-
releases/2013/07/03/smith-micros-poser-software-empowers-rooster-teeth-
productions-upcoming-rwby-web-series)

------
askaboutit
The examples the author uses and states that they are “almost real” are in no
way almost real. To compare his short film to Disney price and art is a joke.
They’re nothing a like. One of Disney’s Moana stills was something like 15GB+.
Try do that in real time.

~~~
carlosdp
The Nvidia RTX Quadro cards recently released can actually handle that size a
scene with ray-tracing in real-time, just fyi, and Disney/Pixar is using them
now.

------
PhilWright
The author probably does not realize that Moore's Law has really slowed down
and the geometric increase in 3D rendering power is unlikely to continue as
fast as in the past. Not to mention that you need ever more graphics
processing power to make smaller and smaller improvements in realism. I
therefore suspect it will take longer than anticipated to get to the cinematic
quality that he hopes for at the price needed for the transformation he
anticipates.

~~~
carlosdp
So for CPUs yes, for GPUs we have seen massive progress even just this year.
The Nvidia RTX cards have actual real-time raytracing, not some demo, an
actual working product, that can handle massive scenes. I saw a Pixar
Renderman talk where they used an Nvidia RTX Quadro to real-time raytrace the
entire city in Coco.

Less about raw power, more about specialization. There is a lot of room still
in specialization. In graphics, with things like ray-tracing, and in AI with
things like the TPUs.

~~~
CyberDildonics
Moore's law is about transistor density, not clock rate, floating point
operations or anything else.

CPUs have risen in transistor count too, they just use the transistors to
speed up serial general purpose computations as much as possible.

Moore's law is not about benchmarks.

------
gonewest
I would say the fallacy is the author's assertion that studios don't know
about realtime techniques, or that they aren't already applying motion capture
and GPU renderers internally.

------
xrd
I remember watching the great documentary "Good Copy Bad Copy." The most
memorable fact from that movie is that Nigeria is the third largest film
industry in the world. And, the film added that they are making films much
more relevant to people from the African disaspora than Hollywood ever will,
as Black Panther proves (it's the exception to the rule and took this long
because Hollywood couldn't move any faster). I'm not doubtful that Hollywood
isn't aware of this shift and will use the technologies, but the author's
point that there is a lot of overhead which will need to be jettisoned to
compete in the future is not something to ignore.

------
bnt
Today you can get 3D motion in pretty much real time just from your iPhone
videos [https://getrad.co](https://getrad.co) (not affiliated with them, just
like the app)

------
trimbo
_Already, real-time animation devices allow cartoon characters to "live."
Systems such as Vactor and Alive propel toons onto talk shows and into
interactive installations at theme parks._

That was from 1995. [https://www.wired.com/1995/12/new-
hollywood/](https://www.wired.com/1995/12/new-hollywood/)

------
pso
The article inspired me to a couple of hours of research of the field. I feel
it helps to see whats currently possible on a relatively low budget. This demo
I came across uses an x sens bodysuit for capture (around $7000, plus yearly
sub - prices aren't public) , and an iphone x for facial capture in realtime
using ARKit programming.

To my amateur eyes, it looks superb, and better than many demos in terms of
the sync/accuracy of the facial expression and speech.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i51CizUXd7A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i51CizUXd7A)

It's also quite charming and amusing. Here's a background article, explaining
the approach.

[https://uploadvr.com/iphone-xsens-performance-capture-
bebylo...](https://uploadvr.com/iphone-xsens-performance-capture-bebylon/)

~~~
carlosdp
That demo was really cool (had the pleasure of seeing it live), and the Kite &
Lightning guys are really great at these kinds of hacks. Keep in mind while
this setup suits their needs for video-game class animation, the iPhone only
supports like 56 blend-shapes (facial expressions), which wouldn't cut it for
film.

------
starbeast
On a somewhat similar theme, but far more in depth and exploratory, is the
video 'Goodbye Uncanny Valley' by Alan Warburton -
[https://vimeo.com/237568588](https://vimeo.com/237568588)

------
veli_joza
A bit weak article for HN frontpage, but it's good enough to start the
discussion.

Yes, the cost of producing quality content will drop drastically. Yes, local
improv groups will start making epic space operas and detailed historical
reenactments.

One thing didn't get mentioned - interactivity. If you're creating content in
real time, you can customize it to specific audience. You can respond to
audience questions, give more screen time to favoured character and even alter
the plot based on voting. What about crowd-sourced animated content?

The technology is already good enough (check Adobe Character Animator), but we
sill need a good digital theatre software.

------
Tossrock
Neil Blomkamp of District 9/Elysium fame has released some shorts made with
the Unity engine and was pretty effusive about the benefits of using a real
time engine for animation:
[https://unity.com/madewith/adam](https://unity.com/madewith/adam)

That said, the results are still quite far from studio CG animation. I wonder
whether the market for cheaply produced animation is really as large as the
author thinks. I think he's underestimating the primary value add of studios,
which is marketing and distribution.

------
ksec
Off Topic Questions for All those working in FX and Studios etc

Are you all in on Nvidia? Are there any shops using AMD? Every Game / FX needs
to mention they partner with Nvidia and I have yet to read much professional
uses on Radeon. I understand for Data Science and Machine learning it is all
CUDA, and likely won't change any time soon. But even for Graphics AMD doesn't
seems to be doing well in professional space.

~~~
manigandham
Both companies are used, but nvidia just has better support and better
drivers. GPUs are mostly used in workstations for real-time renders, lighting
previews, and physics simulations. That stuff works well with CUDA and its
programmability.

Render farms are different, and still CPU driven because of software and
memory. AMD cpus will probably get more use in render farms for the
price/performance, but then GPUs are also getting better at stretching memory
and running other software, which might eventually switch rendering pipelines
to be GPU driven.

------
Animats
Now, from the people who hyped 3D TV and VR headsets, the Next Big Thing.

This is a useful technology for creators, but probably not mass market.

------
xvilka
Too bad that everything centered around NVIDIA in that industry. It is one of
the worst companies for the open source. Not only staying aside of open
source, but actively resisting any attempts of supporting their hardware in
open drivers.

------
JohnJamesRambo
The mocap example he showed was very uncanny valley for me. The disruption he
envisions may be further away than he thinks due to how uncanny valley works.
The closer you get to human the more revulsion you create.

------
sitkack
The author is right, but not in the ways he thinks he is.

The change will be larger and even more unexpected to the people who are
currently expecting it. It will be larger than even I can imagine.

Everyone in this thread can't see the forest for the trees. Tell me a story
...

~~~
manigandham
Ok... care to share any actual details?

~~~
arxpoetica
I actually agree with this comment. It's as simple as saying that the medium
of the internet is still a teenager, and what can be done with it as a
_filmmaking_ tool, per se, is largely untapped.

