Image courtesy of Deron Yamada. © 2004 DYA367.

There’s a lot more visual effects and digital animation work for movies, television, games and commercials being done outside Hollywood these days. And that holds both promise and peril for visual effects artists, animators and production companies.

Promise: Because there are going to be a lot more opportunities for talented professionals, especially in the Bay Area. Peril: Because — as we’ve seen with animation — there’s no reason your job can’t be done by someone in Asia or Europe.

So let’s start with the promise.

Lucasfilm leads the list. Reportedly next summer, George Lucas will open the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco’s Presidio. Much of the film, animation and game operations will move there.

At the fall Digital Studio summit, Industrial Light & Magic cto Cliff Plumer gave a sneak peek of a studio any mogul would be happy to occupy:

Twenty-three acres, including plenty of unobstructed Bay views. Theaters for film and digital projection, dailies and premieres. A motion capture stage for performance capture and work on virtual sets. A 13,500-square-foot data center housing render farms and storage systems. Fiber everywhere, capable of pushing a gig a second to desktops. IP telephony and wireless computing.

“We’re building an infrastructure that takes advantage of the convergence of the film and games industry,” Plumer said. “Our goal is to narrow the distance between our artists and the creative people giving direction, either in the Presidio or anywhere in the world.”

Lucasfilm doesn’t ever want the Letterman campus’ 2,000 employees to go home, Plumer joked. So the facilities will have a daycare center and a fitness center. Not to mention more than 1,000 acres of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area at their doorstep. (Skywalker Sound and some of Lucas’ other creative endeavors will remain in Marin County.)

You ready to leave L.A. yet?

While not as dramatic as Lucasfilm, other Bay Area CGI powerhouses are also growing nicely.

At Pixar, chairman/chief exec Steve Jobs plans a 15-year expansion that will nearly triple the size of its campus in Emeryville and more than double its number of employees.

Pixar plans a three-stage expansion costing $325 million that will add 533,000 square feet to its existing 215,000 square feet of campus space and allowing the company to increase the size of its workforce from 730 to almost 2,000.

In Redwood City to the south, DreamWorks/PDIs’ 370 employees are happily occupying a 120,000-square-foot facility — a welcome change from the three small Palo Alto buildings the company once occupied. Nearby Hewlett-Packard, which helped render Shrek 2, has created its own render farms for Hollywood films.

Around the country, states such as Texas, Louisiana, Florida and Utah are creating incentives to attract top CGI professionals and companies to their regions.

All this is good news for top CGI professionals, who now have many more locations around the country to build their movie, TV and game careers.