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> The designers would fully texture out the inside of a dresser draw that will never be showing in the film. The idea was imagine how much attention to detail

Hehe, as an ex FX animator/TD, this sounds kinda funny to me, there’s likely more to the story. If they knew for sure the textures weren’t going to be shown, it’s a waste of time, not craftsmanship or attention to detail. But it’s plausible because often modeling & surfacing departments have to start work before the shots & camera are fully planned. And sometimes there are camera changes late in the production. It could be that someone’s shot that saw the inside of the dresser drawers got cut, that surfacing expected the drawers to be open in a shot, or that a scene inside the drawer was in storyboards but didn’t make it to layout, stuff like that happens a lot. But no productions are having artists work on stuff that they know will never be shown in the film.

You're thinking of Steve Jobs and his attention to detail on the inside of Apple computers; a trait he learned from his father as detailed in the book about him by Walter Isaacson

Quite the opposite. Texturing something they know will never be seen was (at least in those days) time not spent paying attention to detail on the things that will be.

I do understand it from an artistic perspective, and who knows when and how an asset will be used in the future; but the premise doesn't appear to hold water under scrutiny.

The point of storyboarding is to determine what you want to make. I guess you can consider it part of the "prompt."

Not something that can be automated away assuming you still have preferences at all.

> is it still riding on the decisions of the training data that came from humans like the ones who made Zootopia by hand crafting every element of it?

How could it not be? Even if AI spews out a bunch of stuff that humans end up tweaking this limits future human creative output to modifications of whatever AI has already been trained on. It can only lead to a homogenization of art as AI regurgitates past works over and over again, only to be further distilled as new models are trained on little else but it's own slop or variations on it.

What makes animation interesting are the creative decisions. Character design. Prop design. Background design. Story. The more companies choose to use AI instead of letting artists make those creative choices, the more derivative and less interesting animation will become.

I opened this with an open mind, but it felt dead and AI immediately to me. Neural Viz, however, had succeeded in making things I find watchable all by himself[0] by working around some of the current weaknesses and by having stellar human writing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it seems he got burnt out from doing it all alone so it's been a while since the last upload. The Remo Green one is my favorite[1].

[0]https://www.wired.com/story/the-future-of-ai-media-parody-of...

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bYA2Rv2CQ8

> he's cranking out stuff about as good as Disney Animation all by himself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikm5lP0zsi0

Yeah... no. Not at all. It's just classic AI slop.

Dreamworks used Renderman(Pixar’s Renderman) along with several other commercial package for a Shark Tale. When Dreamworks acquired PDI, who made Shrek under contract for DWA, there was essentially a war between the two pipelines and PDI won. I was on the PDI side of the company, but there was a lot of positive things about the Renderman pipeline.

Because all this animation tech is a moving target, each production's management chooses the software and versions of that software a production will use and then freeze it. So the studios already have in place a subsystem for every production to be running different software for different productions, doing the same jobs as other productions using other software. This allows some experimental renderer to be used in some sequences, and so on, as well as trials of all kinds of software too, such as AI tracking of camera paths, and the soft and hard objects in their view, AI assisted rendering, assisted color timing assistance and then experiments directly with AI video models in a hybrid pipeline.

Both companies each had their own renderer & rendering development team before the acquisition. And their own pipelines. A couple decades later, that’s still true.

what primitives do you use?

You should probably break them down a little further and throw them straight away in the bin.

> The fact we have so many people dedicated to one short movie is amazing and in my eyes always worth the effort.

i’m convinced this is where much of the magic comes from.

it’s the same as why often music written and played by an group of musicians who specialize in their instrument is often so much better than the music from a solo who records each instrument themselves.

Thanks for the links, will check them out.

Everything is. Including this comment. And yours. But if that's the thought upon looking at that post that you need to share, you might need to touch grass, as they say.

The earliest mention I could find for the page is from Feb 2022, which predates ChatGPT, so it wasn't made for that purpose.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/slfb1q/disne...

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