Ah but that's already been done... BY HOLLYWOOD ITSELF! Many people are under the mistaken impression that Hollywood films no longer use miniatures but the reality is quite the opposite. Most of the biggest special effects films today use as many physically real landscapes as they used to, if not more. CGI is very risky because it's not real from the git-go but miniatures are real. All of the Star Wars films (including the prequels) employed tons of miniature builders and most of the landscape environments seen in those films are gorgeous miniatures.
CGI is a great tool for handling stuff like water and fire which was virtually never done well in miniature just because of the realities of physics. One of the challenges of shooting miniatures that used to give their small scale away was depth of field. When a miniature was something like a long space ship, it was nearly impossible to keep the entire thing in focus but now, digital cameras can keep everything in crisp focus.
The digital tools we have now threatened to put practical special effects artists out of work a decade ago but that has completely turned around because those very same digital tools have made our jobs much easier and less expensive to produce and at a higher quality.
The problem is that people believe what they believe until they lay eyes on something that changes their mind, so it's up to people like me to do the work (sometimes at cost) in order to demonstrate that reality.
I can put a stop motion alien on the bridge of your space ship talking to your captain and it will look real because it is real... the low budget CGI alien is going to look like a video game insert shot. (maybe a very good video game but a video game none the less) That difference makes all the difference to whether your audience is distracted by something they know isn't really there.
I have done live action puppet monster effects and I love doing it, but that experience taught me that beyond a certain size live action monster puppets become too heavy to support themselves and need lots of puppeteers to control them and those puppeteers are hard to hide... stop motion monsters can be as big as you like and the puppeteer is never on camera.
Something I don't like to admit but it's true is that most everything you see on my special effects stop motion reel was done dirt cheap, so just imagine what I could do with a small workable budget. So far I've added stop motion special effects into 3 indie films and I'm thrilled that in all cases, the producers and directors were very glad they hired me.
