Laa-Yosh said:
Scanning someone is not a simple process...
First of all it takes a really expensive equipment to get high quality data quickly, and even that won't guarantee that the human you scan can keep from moving during the process. Maquettes are obviously less of a problem here. I don't know how much such a scanner costs, but it's probably somewhere between $10.000 - $1.000.000 or so. Most VFX studios don't have one, they go to a specialized company to handle this like
www.XYZRGB.com. I'm not sure about their rates either, but it certainly isn't cheap.
Maybe not right at this moment. But is that because it's inherently expensive to do, or just because right now it's a specialist process with a small number of rich customers?
Many technologies required for this kind of work are rapidly becoming more widely available or cheaper because of increased demand. High resolution digital video, depth-imaging... and an awful lot can be done in software with a reasonable amount of source data. Software needs processing power and data storage, but both those things are rapidly becoming plentiful at affordable prices.
In years gone by a lot of broadcast video work was prohibitively expensive not because of the hardware itself, but because of the amount of storage required. These days you can throw terabytes of drive in a desktop PC without a second thought.
So I think the costs are going to come down dramatically on this stuff, just as soon as there's a bigger demand for it.
I also think you're going to see the asset creation industry (which already exists) really explode around the requirements for next-gen games and also cg for mainstream work (TV shows rather than big-budget movies). Bigger companies might do everything in-house, but smaller companies are going to go to a specialist and say "we need some characters" or "we need some car models".
Maybe it'll be like hiring an actor - except you'll hire a particular company for the type of virtual-character they have, and they'll customise it for you. Armies of pre-scanned virtual characters ready to be dropped onto standard rigs and licensed for your exclusive use. You needn't even use real actors - just scan random faces and combine them into believable hybrid characters. And/or apply some basic transformations to alter a character to be fatter, thinner or whatever. That way you can actually get many more characters than you've bothered scanning in the first place, again slashing the costs.
Think of it like sperm donation
Offer members of the public a few quid in return for being scanned. People will be queueing up...
Almost all the talk about the bigger budgets and teams required for next-gen work is about the art. Out-sourcing is certainly one way in which that can be solved without having each development house add a zero to its art department headcount.
