Blender and UE, along with a number of other significant software platforms have really gone a long way in democratizing animation. It wasn't so long ago that Blender was much more difficult to use, and UE wasn't really ready for non interactive production until a few years ago. Now everything has changed, and both platforms are free, competent, and have a more accessible learning curve. It's kind of a whole new world for animators.
Or it was.
A few years back, I started down the track of the total replacement technology that AI will bring to animation. A complete paradigm shift that bears only a fractional resemblance to the workflows we've become accustomed to. It's pretty much progressing as I expected, but a partially unexpected problem has surfaced, and it's a big one.
The speed of development in this new field has begun to accelerate at an unprecedented pace over the last 2 years specifically.
Here's what I'm dealing with. I bought a cinema camera a decade ago, and did my research at purchase time. A camera from 1982 (studio camera) and the camera I purchased, were almost interchangeable in output quality. 30 years of stability, where a cinematographer could invest in a tech tree, utilize it, and build on experience with that technology over a long and stable period.
Today I'm having to rebuild my pipeline every 3 months. It's obsolete after that. It will take years to build a product that's competitive in the global market, so basically any product I make will become outdated by the time I publish it.
Meanwhile, I'm being swarmed with low effort people trying to cash in overnight. 10,000 new instagram accounts per day showing AI pictures they made by going onto a website. You can absolutely tell the difference between what they make and what I create with a hand built custom pipeline with a 200gb data back, but it's turned me into a needle in a haystack. What I'm creating today would have made me world famous 5 years ago.
I've always been a big proponent of democratization, and still am, but simultaneously I'm experiencing a huge problem where a screenshot from 3000 hours of work, looks similar enough to a screenshot of 3 seconds of work, that a layman can't always tell the difference. There are solutions, and I'm already ahead of the game on those, but still, this enormous wall of noise, mostly young children playing with toys, is quickly reaching a level where a Pavarotti or Grieg, were one to emerge, would almost certainly be buried beneath the endless cacophony.
How are you guys planning to address the issue of the devaluation of creative currency that has inevitably accompanied this tech surge in visual authoring?
