5 ms·
It's artist time that is expensive - even render time is cheap in comparison. VFX houses are happy to spend loads of money on renderfarms and wait 12 hours a fr
by berkut 14y ago
It's artist time that is expensive - even render time is cheap in comparison. VFX houses are happy to spend loads of money on renderfarms and wait 12 hours a frame, but it's mainly artist time that costs money.
Software cost only has a small influence in the general picture, although the Indian and Chinese VFX companies using unlicensed software gives them even more of an edge than cheap labour by itself does.
- raverbashing 14y agoYes, the cost of keeping HW up to date is non-negligible, even if it is a small part of the costs. That 12h per frame has remained more or less constant for the past years, they'd rather have more details than speed it up =) (I suppose modern hardware can render Toy Story today in real time and even more) But the cost of artists reflect the cost of where they live, pick a less expensive city in the US and you can probably match UK/New Zealand Of course, it can't be NullPointer, Wyoming but in a bigger area it shouldn't be a problem
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- berkut 14y agoA lot of the more mundane stuff is already "outsourced" or given to VFX houses' offices in other parts of the world like India. e.g. SPI send all their Roto to India, they've just moved all their comping and lighting to Vancouver, it's mainly just R&D that's in Culver City now. That's probably going to happen more and more now - instead of having dedicated Roto departments, it'll be outsourced as a way to cut costs.
- mixmastamyk 14y agoNew Mexico is getting a decent portion of CA vfx refugees.
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