Both the topic: 'more spent on marketing than production' and the first post 'numbers can't be trusted because of creative accounting practices'. I wouldn't be surprised if this applied to the game studios, too.
Anyway, you're essentially stating two things. One is that art students have been able to produce this level of quality for their show-reels for ages. If students can do it, it can't be all that expensive. So why did we not see it in games before, but only show-reels? Not because these students or studios couldn't translate a show-reel to an interactive show-reel (i.e., a game). Rather more likely, because there's no market for it because nobody has the money for the hardware to run these things real-time. Now we're seeing this thing render on real-time on consumer hardware that might in 5 years be affordable to mainstream audiences.
Seems to me the biggest barrier was there's no market because there's no cheap hardware that can run high-quality in real-time. Of course cost of art is a factor, a big one, but I don't think it's been the primary limiting factor.
Lastly, the cost of art at any given quality level has come down in a big way. It's offset by increasing demands. But try to buy some assets of 2011 type quality, it's cheap, while 5 years ago you'd have had to hire a big team to deliver that. Once you approach realism, the amount of improvements to quality diminish and you get a build up of cheap assets (textures, template models etc) that can be tweaked and used and bought cheaply. Assets from 5-10 years ago are like cheap commodities already, tomorrow's assets are expensive, but at some point there's a limit to quality improvements and just like every other industry (e.g. smartphones in 2016) you see commoditisation and the cost come down.
A two minute film is not a videogame. A show reel requires one good animation to work in one specific situation. A videogame needs an animation that works generally. Also, making a good animation is hard, and artists deserve to be paid. Think of movies, where there are still movies today which have unrealistic CG, despite computation being far from a bottleneck for a feature film (Legolas on the elephant in LOTR: Two Towers) - it's not the technical challenges, it's the artistic challenges.
Right now, the vast majority of games have characters with fixed walk cycles that are used no matter the terrain. Realistic CG needs to have a walk cycle that captures the subtle changes in gait that corresponds to a given surface. I know people have been doing research on adaptive walk cycle, but afaik it has yet to hit production games.
For generating art, there is hope, as procedurally generated games look fantastic (No Man's Sky), but have yet to expand beyond sci-fi games, or into games with story and specific art styles.
Maybe reusing assets is the way forward, but I'm skeptical. Reusing the visuals just means more army guys fighting in sandy deserts crouching behind crates. Maybe the Storm Trooper models for battlefront really are as good as they get. But even then, I think aesthetically realism can lead to a dead end. The most visually impressive game I've played, other than Star Wars Battlefront is The Witness, which is simple in the CG sense, but has some really tremendous visual aesthetic moments that are something I've never seen done in a game. For me, the stylized look and the artistic/game opportunities that enabled were far more exciting than Battlefront's perfect rocks.
> still movies today which have unrealistic CG, despite computation being far from a bottleneck for a feature film (Legolas on the elephant in LOTR: Two Towers)
One point to note - LOTR Two Towers was released in 2002. 14 years ago.
I'm claiming that at this level hardware power, the hardware power isn't the limiting factor in realism, the animations are.
Realistic visuals needs realistic walk cycle. But since realistic walking isn't a perfect stable cycle (it is disturbed by head/hand motions, surface variations, etc), there can be no realistic walk cycle because real walking isn't a cycle. AFAIK current videogame animation all involves walk cycles. Realism at this level of detail needs some new form of animation, not the love and care of a person that is so present in this demo.
regarding the walk cycles on terrain, good work is seeing use with inverse kinematics. For modern era games the technology is readily available and generally robust that solves this issue.
I wouldn't describe the usage as trivial, but it's in line with other toolsets that deal with different issues.
>If students can do it, it can't be all that expensive.
That's not really true at all. It comes down to man-hours and how much time it takes the artist to do the work. A student isn't incurring that cost when they do work for themselves, but a company would be.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/4412zk/til_s...
Both the topic: 'more spent on marketing than production' and the first post 'numbers can't be trusted because of creative accounting practices'. I wouldn't be surprised if this applied to the game studios, too.
Anyway, you're essentially stating two things. One is that art students have been able to produce this level of quality for their show-reels for ages. If students can do it, it can't be all that expensive. So why did we not see it in games before, but only show-reels? Not because these students or studios couldn't translate a show-reel to an interactive show-reel (i.e., a game). Rather more likely, because there's no market for it because nobody has the money for the hardware to run these things real-time. Now we're seeing this thing render on real-time on consumer hardware that might in 5 years be affordable to mainstream audiences.
Seems to me the biggest barrier was there's no market because there's no cheap hardware that can run high-quality in real-time. Of course cost of art is a factor, a big one, but I don't think it's been the primary limiting factor.
Lastly, the cost of art at any given quality level has come down in a big way. It's offset by increasing demands. But try to buy some assets of 2011 type quality, it's cheap, while 5 years ago you'd have had to hire a big team to deliver that. Once you approach realism, the amount of improvements to quality diminish and you get a build up of cheap assets (textures, template models etc) that can be tweaked and used and bought cheaply. Assets from 5-10 years ago are like cheap commodities already, tomorrow's assets are expensive, but at some point there's a limit to quality improvements and just like every other industry (e.g. smartphones in 2016) you see commoditisation and the cost come down.