I, for one, welcome our ray-traced overlords
Prompted by a blog post I watched Resident Evil: Degeneration last night. The computer-generated movie is so-so, so despite the current astronomical 9.0 rating I can’t really recommend it. However, what impressed me was the quality of the animation.
In some short scenes you can’t tell it’s computer-generated. I could show you a frame from this movie and a frame from the “normal” Resident Evil movie and you couldn’t tell which one had real humans and which one had computer-generated ones.
The two glaring problems were the human skin and walking. Other than that the level of almost-realistic detail is amazing.
So what happens in ten or twenty years when the computing power goes up between thousand and a million times? (And remember, ray-tracing and movie frames are easy to parallelize so the Moore’s law is going to hold for them.) Add technologies like this or this and it’s clear that both the quality of facial animations and textures will dramatically improve.
Which leads me to the following question: will there still be a need to actors in twenty years? Will the movie studios generate their own actors instead of paying them $20 million a pop even for sequels? They’ll probably still need somebody actor-ish to come up with distinct character personas (think Brad Pitt in 12 Monkeys or Heath Ledger in the Dark Knight), but it can be a fat bald guy instead of a rare individual that has both the good looks and the acting skill