This year's Imagina put forth the opinion that the thrill in visual effects is gone. Even with the tremendous achievements in animation and film vfx, we've seen it all. The industry has entered a plateau. Unless noted, all images courtesy of Imagina.

For the last few years, Imagina, one of the most important European 3D events, has been re-imagining itself. The recent 2008 edition clearly showed the results of this reorientation. Held yearly in Monaco since the early '80s, the Imagina Festival used to be a place where mad graphic artists met with crazy scientists to produce the new images that would wow us all. But times have changed. Vfx have become increasingly common. With the expansion of 3D usage, software and hardware vendors started looking for new customers. Imagina decided to follow the trend and shifted its focus to new markets such as architecture, landscaping, urbanism and industrial design.

Yet, strangely enough, this new direction may herald a new era for the vfx industry. As Electronic Arts CTO Glenn Entis outlined in the opening session, the thrill in visual effects is gone... What he meant is that, by now, we've seen it all. There have been tremendous achievements in animation and film vfx, so much so that we've become somewhat jaded and that the public, and perhaps the professionals as well, are in need of something really new. This may be a blunt statement, but the truth of the matter is that the usual behind-the-scenes presentations of this year's big films seemed to be a rerun of other presentations seen so many times before.

Does it mean that the thrill usually associated with our jobs is completely dead and gone? Of course not. But it does appear that the vfx industry is now in some sort of plateau phase, where everybody is polishing techniques that have been developed in the past few years through extremely intense hard work by leading artists and researchers.

An interesting question arises from Imagina: where will the next thrill come from? The most obvious answer is that it will emerge from a combination of videogames and cinema. 

Automating Emotion
And so, an interesting question arises: where will the next thrill come from? The most obvious answer is that it will emerge from a combination of videogames and cinema. The games industry, with its realtime constraints and its need to produce persistent worlds that can auto-generate themselves, is tackling extremely complex problems with far smaller budgets (per image) than the vfx industry. Even if his statements left out many parameters, Enntis reminded the audience that feature film renders average three frames per hr., whereas realtime videogames are at the 216,000 frames per hr. mark. This means a price performance ration of 1:540,000 between film and games! The only way the videogames industry can make up for this huge disadvantage is by developing tools able to automate the creation of strongly believable worlds, characters, animation...