“The Hollywood CG establishment is eroding,” Raitt continues. “I think as more and more directors who know 3D start taking the reigns, a lot of the infrastructure and job descriptions involved in today’s filmmaking will go away. People will lose jobs at first, but I think of this as a creative kind of destruction, like the burning of a forest. I look forward to the day when a CG auteur, not a studio, is `cast’ to deliver a lead character for a film. I think the future of this industry is going to the artists, not to the factories.”

Adds Rusty Ippolito, a freelance CG supervisor with his own company, Make Inc: “Small boutiques can accommodate a lot more work. Rather than having instructions dictated by someone through a chain of command, as in the past, independents now handle their own bids, talk to creatives and DPs directly, do their own rigs, work on the set and oversee all aspects of the vfx sequences for which they’re responsible. “I’m in charge of it. The blueprint of the fx is completely driven by me.”

“There’s more competition, but it’s good competition that raises the level of what we all do,” Kerlow adds. “A decade ago, you were one of the big players or you didn’t play. Now, a lot of work is being done by smaller companies that didn’t exist four, five, six years go. People are pursuing CG-animated projects independently. It’s not limited to a half dozen studios.”

Technology Advances
Ongoing improvements in speed, efficiency and cost have had a greater impact on the work of the digital production artist to date than more high-profile innovations such as realtime rendering and motion capture/performance capture, which will deliver big time further down the road. Many artists, however, consider realtime rendering and MoCap more marketing hype than reality, even though they are incorporated in certain situations.

For example, in film and commercial work, studios rely on realtime technologies for previs. Companies such as Industrial Light & Magic have proprietary tools that allow realtime feedback on the set. Studios increasingly use motion capture for crowd scenes and battle sequences in such films as Alexander, Gladiator and Titanic. “It speeds up the process for photoreal [crowd scenes] and is the most efficient way to cut the costs,” explains Huang.

MoCap is still used mainly just in high-budget situations, however, and it has a way to go technologically. It generally doesn’t work well yet for facial animation, for instance, unless combined with keyframe information, hence the current backlash aimed at The Polar Express, despite its advances in performance capture. “I’ve seen eyeball-capture technology that’s really pushing the envelope,” says Ippolito. “But most MoCap is either creepy or just bad.”

The technologies that are having a bigger impact include low-cost 3D tracking software and inexpensive-but-powerful rendering packages such as mental ray, motion-blur technologies, better occlusion shaders and improved compositing packages. “They make me more attractive to hire again,” Ippolito says. As for MoCap and realtime rendering, “They don’t make an impact in my life right now.”

Artist Aaron Sims knows that no matter how advanced technology gets, characters always come first, as displayed in his personal short film/book project Tethered Islands. © Aaron Sims.

Stan Winston Studios art director Aaron Sims, who has an instructional DVD on 3D design coming out soon, sees a trend toward products that “bridge the gap between traditional artists and digital artists.” He cites Zbrush, which has become a critical design tool at the studio (along with Softimage XSI), as an example of a package that makes digital design and virtual sculpting user-friendlier for traditional designers.

At Stan Winston Studios, physical and digital artists work together to create the creatures, using “a hybrid approach where we marry the two [disciplines],” explains Sims. The goal is to create a character that becomes part of the story rather than a technical novelty where viewers are caught up in trying to identify the techniques used to make it. “We don’t want it to stand out as bad CG or a bad puppet. The modern audience can pinpoint stuff really quickly. It shouldn’t look like an effect unless that’s intentional.”

New technology is causing job descriptions to merge and creating a need for generalists. “It’s making it possible for a small crew of multi-talented people to outperform a CG factory of 100 specialists,” insists Raitt. “This has far-reaching ramifications, from peoples’ livelihoods to the entry into the market of low-budget CG projects.”