CGI and VFX are becoming an integral part of major audio visual mediums, ranging from mobile apps to massive broadcast data. We are witnessing a huge growth in new studio setups and design boutiques. Leaving aside the big and shiny infrastructure, these are small sized team of generalist artists who are pulling off the most challenging jobs easily. Animation and Visual Effects industry has always been artistic and technical skill based industry, and now it is becoming more and more prominent. Rather than typical formal training, it emphasis on your artistic and aesthetics sense.
Current and future state of the VFX Industry:
Current state of the VFX industry around the world is very robust, as movies or any video content filled up with significant VFX technology is excelling in terms of grabbing consumers attention and revenue. Apart from movies, Animation and VFX has became an essential part of Gaming, web series (OTT – Over The Top), commercials, documentaries, corporate videos, AR & VR (Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality) and more.
Leaving aside the dedicated visual effects softwares like Nuke, Houdini, Maya; there are also small scale but effective VFX apps are available in the market. This serves as a first user experience with pre-defined templates. Ease of using these can lead the user to learn and adapt more complex softwares, as mentioned above. All of a sudden, 360 degree videos, 4K / 8K videos became easy things online. Free and open source softwares like Blender, GIMP, Krita, Natron are becoming first choice for many freelancers and small scale studios.
We have seen that even in the disturbed area of COVID-19 pandemic, our industry survived, even it took a great hit. We fought with the challenges and came up with robust solution of remote / work from jobs. All the artists, around the world, dedicatedly finished their projects from home. All major studios quickly set up the required infrastructure to ease such remote work. Now the scenario is such, many leading Production and Post Production Studios are in favour of WFH job option even after the lockdown is open. Still, there are huge remote job openings in Animation and VFX arena.
The age of disruption:
This is the turning point in the era of 3D Animation and Visual Effects industry. The disruption has already break through it. Companies from the VFX industry are innovating novel technologies to enhance the user experience and create faster post production pipeline. Some of the latest trends, technologies and workflows are as follows:
- Foundry launched Athera, cloud based post production pipeline (increasing use of SaaS – Software as a Service – based products and cloud computing softwares / solutions)
- Advanced photogrammetry softwares (Capturing Reality, AliceVision, 3DF Zephyr etc.) are replacing tedious manual work of modeling, texturing, UV mapping and related
- Virtual production is taking shape on giant level (The Jungle Book 3D and The Lion King 3D by Jon Favreau are milestone movies, where virtual production is used on the top notch level)
- Foundry Katana is making rendering pipeline very much streamlined
- Process of creating and manipulating Digital humans / creatures and 3D cities are becoming standard industry norms (Avengers series, Gemini Man, Dumbo, Game of Thrones, Warcraft, Furious 7, Pokémon to just name a few)
- VFX is using AI (Artificial Intelligence) as a back-end driver for realistic output (Rotobot Nuke plugin based on deep learning – machine language, semantic segmentation and AI based neural networks)
- LED walls and projection of real images to replace chroma shooting, which was a must thing for VFX shooting
According to the report, the global VFX market accounted for USD 11,333 million in 2018 and is expected to reach USD 23,854 million by 2025, at a CAGR of around 11.4% between 2019 and 2025.