What exactly about CGI makes it so expensive?
As an arch. student, when we render buildings there is nothing inherently financially expensive about it other than the one time software fee.
Obviously the two fields aren't that comparable, but it's still provokes the question. Is it the human labor? The time? There are obviously overhead fees the software companies have to take care off, but what makes the computer generated imagery itself so expensive?
I would think just the labour and how qualified the people are
>>67764312
the market decided that it costs a lot to hire 3d artists
the constant innovation being pushed
the constant upgrading of technology
the highly paid and skilled staff
the giant server farms
overcharging
>>67764312
.we render buildings
>Render Buildings
>CGI
>Movie scenes that look realistic while moving
kekekek jajajaja
the time and electricity it takes to process it all considering how large the final image is meant to be displayed at
although like most things in hollywood it's probably an embezzlement scam and they go oh yeah we need uhhhh 100 million dollars for all this spaceship CGI aheh uh the money will all be going towards the movie of course goyim
>>67764312
Its the labor time and the amount of detail you want. You can have 2 people doing CGI on transformers and that shit will look like 1998 beast wars or you can have 20 people doing one character on transformers and you have a much much more detailed transformer. Think about all the little details they added in the first transformers movie. I.E. moving gears lights fluids ect ect. Takes an incredible amount of time to make that shit all detailed like that.
>>67764366
You can rent out cheap server farms with Amazon aws and shit.
>>67764422
get on the phone to ILM
>>67764312
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL6hp8BKB24
this guy explains it quite well.
I guess the artists charge a shitton.
I don't know why, CGI always looks so obviously like CGI, real effects look so much better and are probably cheaper now.
>>67764312
Cost of skilled staff and expertise.
Also, I've never seen an architectural render that doesn't look like complete shit.
>>67764383
There's always one faggot.
>the two fields aren't that comparable
Learn to reading comprehension faggot.
The render farms, rendering a tour at 23fps through a low poly count enclosed building is not comparable to the amount of hours it takes to render a couple of seconds of movie CGI
>>67764480
OP here.
>never seen an architectural render that doesn't look like complete shit
Probably because the renders need to appeal to a client and the best way to one up everyone is to over dramatize lighting and ambient effects.
Some of the best renderings in my opinion come from watercolor renderings before there was Revit and AutoCAD and we had to do it manually.
I'm always kind of amazed by videogames and what real-time graphics they come out with on a <$30m budget. I sometimes wonder what games devs could do if they had a blockbuster movie budget of $200m. I mean, GTA V could be the tip of the iceberg, as that "only" cost ~$100m or so.
>>67764476
This guy doesnt explain why CG is expensive you dumb fuck. He just rambles on about CGI being perceived as being bad, even though he sees it as an important part of cinema. He then goes on to state that we "only" perceive "bad" CGI when we consider a movie to be bad, making "the bad CGI" the movie's fault.
Iffy logic imo and it doesnt explain OP's question.
CGI is expensive because it requires a lot of specialized man hours to create. A lot of factors go into making CGI. If you then add a directors vision, colour palette, under what "laws" the CGI is supposed to act under etc. it becomes even more specialized and time consuming, thus becoming more expensive.
You also have to compute the imagery. Didnt Disney like book a supercomputer for a few weeks to render Frozen ? That shit is expensive as well too.
>>67764598
>I sometimes wonder what games devs could do if they had a blockbuster movie budget of $200m
Just look at Star Citizen.
It's nothing. Oh but they hired some Hollywood actors for no reason that nobody will care about after they've finished the 6 hour campaign.
>>67764598
It may be an exponential decrease in cost/return ratio. Why spend 120 milllion when it would only net you a million more in sales? Can 100 million get the job done? I've noticed most blockbuster movies budgets tend to stop at about 200 million disregarding a select few.
It's also worth noting that that video game graphics still cannot compare to pre-rendered hyper realistic frames in a movie.
>>67764390
electricity and hardware could be done cheaply with cloud sourcing, which I bet most of them do, as they do not have the resources and expertise to handle the server farms.
>>67764312
Labor. Have you seen the credits for VFX artists? VFX tools and software may be improving but not enough for the studios to just outsource them to cheaper artists with bad skills. Time is also a factor. Studios are forced to make their VFX faster than they can actually make them so they just hire more staff to fasten the process.
>>67764862
So what you guys are saying is I should become a VFX artist
if they spend so much on labor, how come animation companies still hire big celebrities to do voice work? they cost more than a regular person who can easily do the same job for free
>>67764970
Because famous Actors are a box office draw. Actors are paid after how many people they can get into the movies.
>>67764970
Marketing, and, with some exceptions, the salaries of actors are usually a relatively small fraction of the total cost in any film or TV production.
I'm always baffled by just how much movies and TV cost. It feels like budgets are hugely bloated and you could get it done for significantly less.
>>67765418
I honestly would love to see a film's total breakdown of its multimillion dollar budget.
Marketing is huge but that's not factored in, is it? And actors make a shit-ton but that can't be all of it.
CGI/post processing, crew, catering, rentals, effects, etc. It can't truly add up to half a billion can it.
>>67765508
I mean, even something like Steve Jobs cost $30m. Where is all that money going?
It's well-known that a TV drama typically costs $3m per hour, which is crazy to me, and something like Vinyl cost like $7m/episode.
Buildings are literally the easiest thing to model and make look realistic. Let me see some of your organic renders. Can i see some of your life like CGI? Creatures, humans? Can i see your animations please? Can i see your particle effects? Let me see your rig set ups. Can i see some of your material set ups?
>>67765597
It's gotta be primarily actor salaries. You could go to a local university and get some potheads to put together something that looks like the typical hour-long TV drama episode for a fraction of the cost.
Also these network shows and their CGI is fucking atrocious. You cannot tell me there are less costly and better suited alternatives. There are fucks on Youtube who put together better effects for fun.
>>67764486
>rendering a simple representative model of a building
>rendering photorealistic physical simulation of things that have no baseline in reality
>THESE ARE DA SAEM THING!!!
you have downs
>>67765684
It's definitely not actor salaries, unless you're on a long-running megahit show or are a big name. I believe $20-30k/ep is fairly typical for a new network show, with bumps each year - good money but a fraction of the cost of production.
>>67765664
>>67765776
My point is that there is no fee involved in the actual rendering process which leads me to ask what are the fees involved in CGI? The labor? The hardware? The time? The skill?
>THESE ARE DA SAEM THING!!!
I explicitly said they are not. Please put a Magnum next to your temple and blow your brains out for being such a retarded mongoloid.
>>67764970
Animated films aren't necessarily that expensive. We're talking about paying for CGI on top of a live-action film which has assloads of other costs already.
24 frames per second
>every frame has to be CGI'd
>every frame takes literally hours
>10 seconds mean 240 frames need to be CGI'd
>now take a movie that's has 30 minutes of CGI
>THATS 43,200 FRAMES
WHAT DO YOU THINK MAKES IT EXPENSIVE?
>>67764570
wasn't that used in the original star trek?
>>67765965
No shit. Put that together all by yourself?
>>67765965
This, kinda. But they don't do CGI frame by frame, they have models which need to flow in animation frame by frame.
Though it is pretty labour intensive.
>majoring in architecture
>not having an engineering degree and an MBA
>>67766031
No.
>>67764312
Are you really comparing a hollywood blockbuster to your shitty one bedroom apartment renderings?
>KYSMM
Jew Tax.
>>67766111
>engineering degree in 2016
kek
>>67766141
>explicitly say they are not that comparable
>>67764598
Star wars the old republic had a 300 million dollar budget and it was the biggest piece of shit ever.
The dev team behind the game generally decides on the graphics.
You have Star wars battlefront from Dice, made on the Frostbite engine, and it looks amazing. But then you can have another multiplat game from an equally large publisher, and it'll look like shit, even when it's on the same budget.
Even in Eastern European countries, you have dev teams working on passion projects like Metro and Witcher 2 for zero pay, and those games look more impressive than anything a AAA game could give.
What would be impressive is if a small dev team is given a monstrous budget to work on a passion project, and all the time in the world.
That's what I'm hoping from CDPR with Cyberpunk, after the money made from Witcher 3.
>>67766095
CGI that is modeled usually doesn't incorporate lighting and reflections. That almost always have to be done frame by frame unless you have a complete CGI scene.
>>67766224
swtor was great, don't be mad
they should made a realer than real life swtor movie rather than a shitty wow movie
This calculation will be rough, so bare with me.
If you sit through the credits of a big budget movie, you notice that there are literally thousands of people working on one movie.
The average yearly salary of a CGI animator is ~$60,000. A movie might take a year or more to make.
If a movie takes a year to animate, and you have 1000 people working on it, that's an average payout of $60 million.
>>67764706
Hi Norris
>>67764312
guy working as a 3d artists in vidya here
3 reasons
1 cgi jobs are overpaid
currently you can earn anywhere from 30-120k with teh average being around 60k$ as professional even at a smaller studio, at bigger ones where most movie work gets done its easy to have a full team with every person earning 100k$
2 takes a lot of time
now taking in the account the average pay, lets set on 70k$ at a studio like ILNM
now it take around 2-8 per model for me to make for movie or aaa gaming, thats without iteration period that can take months, add a rigger and an animator, someone to make blend shapes, set up shaders and a 3 man team can make a SINGLE background character for use in cgi scene in one or two months, it will take days or weeks to model a car, and if youw nat to use 3d scanning or technical accurate mesurments, it can take weeks of preperation, another job for a 3 man team to make a taxi car for weeks
now its time to make props hundreds of them, hundred or so characters, block out scenes, post production, composting, directing the scenes, making fluid simulations, everything, and we easily go over 100 people needed
3 How many people work on it
avarege cgi team size credited in a movie is around 150 people, and we already are at 10mln$ mark fpr 12 months of work
now we have to realize its very rare one company does all the work, usually multiple studios work at the same time
on iron man 3 cgi 17 different studios were credited, so yeah, you can easily need 100 mln$ to cover them all
And keep in mind we only talked about how much the employees upkeep costs.
How much it costs a studio to the effects and how much it will charge the movie producer are 2 different things.
Licensing, software development, management, and we can easily double or tripple the initial cost.
now lets shorten the average work done by a studio from 12 months to 3 multiply by 10 studios and triple the cgi costs and we will arrive at 100mln$ cgi cost on a big blockbuster movie
>>67764312
It takes lots and lots of people and time to make it, so mostly labor costs.
>>67764312
>how come CGI is expensive? I'm a student and I actually have to pay others when I make CGI for free
>>67766489
You should do an AMA
On a related sidenote I wonder why artificial voices are lagging so far behind. I'm not even that much a fan of the genre but imagine how many more branching out storylines you could cram into RPG's when you wouldn't have to get voice actors into the studio to record it all.
>>67766276
>swtor was great,
Not that guy, but I only played about an hour and can say it's shit. Those stupid non-connecting attack effects are plain awful. I won't delve into supposed lore rape SWtor commited
>>67765597
As someone who's been on a lot of sets I think it's probably the catering. They're expensive as fuck and they have to feed the whole crew with a wide range of weird expensive hippy health food. Lot's of Quorn and vegetarian food, lots of gluten free options. Lots of fresh produce, and all those busses where the people eat. If you think about how many people can be on a set you can see how quickly it adds up.
>>67764393
>The first season of Beast Wars cost $18 million, according to a 1997 interview with Bob Forward.
>>67764390
It isn't a scam, I don't know why it's so expensive but it's one of the few parts of the budget that isn't a jewish trick. CGI heavy films regularly bankrupt the freelance studios that take on the jobs as they are only payed a flat rate even if they end up having to do reshoots e.g. Life of Pi won an oscar but destroyed the company that did all the effects.
>>67764970
Marketing.
But also, if you think a regular person can do voice acting you're a moron. Not only does the average person have an awful voice, but they have no idea how to be clear, articulate, intonate, have proper rhythm or inject emotion into what they saying, especially if they are reading from a script.
>>67766111
>current year
>falling for the STEM scheme
India and China, a quarter of the worlds population are churning out STEM drones at ridicilous rates and they're ready to do it for a quarter of your salary. Face it, it's a bad time to be an introverted, hubris filled little precious cogwheel.
>>67764970
>Myers Murphy
>Diaz Lithgow
Shriek had a pretty top tier cast tbqh family
>>67766568
i usually find it that people run out of any worthwhile questions after 5 minutes, and when talking with my friends i can see them yawing after 10
nobody really cares outside of why, or how much it costs or the standard "how much you earn" which is too much to mention without making people jelous
>>67764477
> CGI always looks so obviously like CGI, real effects look so much better
That's because you only notice CG when it's bad. Half of the "real effects" you like that you think was shot on film...was probably CGI. Even fucking romantic comedies are full of CG. It's everywhere, you only notice it when it's glaringly terrible.
>>67766876
They're quite good at composites, then again it's nothing more than pasteing a couple of stock footages together and running it through some cheap shaderblender.
>>67766876
This.
Idiots think CGI is only used in action/sci-fi movies and ignore when it's used to make characters seem like they're against a Paris backdrop or make city lights look brighter, etc.
It's not the CGI, it's Hollywood being coddled bullshit with heavy inflation.
Jurassic Park had a budget of 63 million dollars. Adjusted for inflation that 104 million dollars today.
Think about it. The movie that started the whole fucking experiment, the biggest thing ever - literarilly consider a middle-budget cheap-ass movie today.
Or look at the Pixar movies, earlier stuff was done on 90 million dollars, now it's impossible to find a movie done for less than 175 million dollars.
Despicable Me was made on a budget of 69 million dollars and it was all CGI. All the Ice Age movies were made under 100 million. Same with Hotel Transilvania films. Or The Lego Movie. 9 was made on 30 million dollars. Zack Snyder's Legend of the Guardian was made on 80 million and that one had amazing CGI.
And you can find more examples like that. The difference is just that bigger studios, bigger pay for every idiot who runs around in that studio, bigger cut to every actor and all those middlemen and giant faggots who just "coordinate" stuff and so on.
Because to make proper (nearly)photo realistic cgi requires HEAVY rendering, computer farms rendering. Add in equipment costs, people to maintain and people to do the actual modelling and the costs mount up.
Compare to animation/anime where cgi is actually the cheaper solution because it doesn't have to look realistic and so you don't need a super computer to render it.
>>67766675
I honestly think they just have way too many staff doing unnecessary bullshit in bloated productions.
>>67764312
You have to do 24 renderings per second of film and you have to change them to give the impression of animation.
>>67765597
I imagine Vinyl costs that much considering how many songs they use per episode
>>67767322
>Because to make proper (nearly)photo realistic cgi requires HEAVY rendering, computer farms rendering. Add in equipment costs, people to maintain and people to do the actual modelling and the costs mount up.
render farms are literally the cheapest part of cgi process
stop talking out of your ass
for 500k, a 6 man salary in a big studio of few hundred you can set up nasa tier render farm
its literally nothing for a studio with tens or few hundred million $ revenue
and lets get real, you can just pay to use any of the thousand of firms that will let you use their equipment, with dirt cheap prices per node or core hour
>>67767553
And lots of big names being paid silly money. Still obscene. Meh, HBO has money to burn, but the ratings are fucking terrible
>>67767604
Yeah, I don't get it either, it's not 1994 anymore, there's a shit-ton of processing power about.
>>67765857
Holy shit not even who you're replying to but you're just so dumb and arrogant it's cringe worthy reading your posts.
People do cgi. People get paid. A big team works hours for cgi. Big team gets paid big money. Simple enough or do I want a drawing?
Considering the number of independent artists out there producing similar if not better quality CGI without even getting paid, I see your point OP.
Arch. Solidarity here.
>>67764312
>but what makes the computer generated imagery itself so expensive?
nothing.
in fact its LESS expensive.
Imagine Lord of the Rings without CG, unfilmable
imagine avengers without CG, unfilmable.
CGI IS CHEAP
>>67767322
CGI movies aren't cheaper or less complex to render either. It's all to do with lighting shit being massively CPU intensive. If the computer power was THAT expensive then they spend a shit-ton of time on techniques to optimise it (much like games do), but it's way cheaper to throw hardware and time at the problem.
>>67767723
>not even who you're replying to
sure.
3D software ain't cheap. And the price is per computer. And they release a new version every year.
>>67767839
WE'RE ALL ANONYMOUS HERE ANON. U MAD?
>>67767941
Compared to staff costs it is fuck all. People aren't seeing the CGI forest for the CGI trees.
>>67767839
Are you really that shocked that more than 2 people are calling an idiot an idiot?
>>67764312
Time.
Professor at my school work in the animation industry. Huge CG shots take hours to render and then need to be composited together.
He will tell students that their scene is too expensive and companies wont hire them if they can't do the same job with less polygons and lights.
>>67767723
Break it down faggot. Don't over generalizing it.
>>67766489 was an excellent answer.
No wonder most 4chan boards are shit.
>>67764312
You dont know it yet, but 3D takes A LOT of time.
