I'm not in the field myself, though animation was my original career and I know people who work in feature animation.
To answer your question, the field has been sloooowly diversifying in some ways, as you say with Unreal (particularly since Unreal's engine is fast and good for real-time previews), but I don't see a huge push for moving away from does-it-all packages like Maya or 3DS Max. The economic incentive isn't there. Studios have figured out how to make their money and are comfortable with the pipelines that they already have. This isn't to say their pipelines are good. In fact, many of you would be shocked at just how bad most animation pipelines are at big studios. Not only are they way too vendor-locked (as is kind of the case with Maya), but they don't want to pay an adequate salary for qualified software engineers who can build better pipelines and write more software that's agnostic. Of course, I'm making sweeping generalizations, but this is the kind of story I've heard more often than not. Pixar is known for having good practices and they write (and sell) their own software, but I don't closely know anyone who has worked there.
It's going to take a decline in the field of animation before studios realize that they're basically stuck in 2006 in terms of how their artists are working to make their content. I won't mention them here, but people at certain major studios have been trying to get things like Unreal for 10+ years and never get approval to receive licenses for it and they never do because higher ups don't believe they'd see a monetary return on investment. Their content is so profitable that the people in charge don't really give a fuck.
In case I didn't make it clear, I'm pretty much an outsider at this point, so I'm sure there may be some more relevant viewpoints here that would contradict mine. I don't intend to be authoritative.
“ Their content is so profitable that the people in charge don't really give a fuck.”
Sorry but that’s completely wrong. Almost every animation or vfx studio is barely scraping by. Margins have been reduced so much for film work it’s extremely difficult to turn a profit, which is why so much work is outsourced overseas these days. The reason software isn’t better is because they barely have the resources to improve it.
Everyone’s aware of newer tools, but things like unreal still arnt as good as traditional non-realtime pipelines in terms of flexibility and scalability.
In my opinion, most of the 3D software and renderers are starting to align in their workflows and set up. If you've spent enough time in a 3D package and have your fundamentals down, then a reasonably experienced 3D artist could make something look good in Maya, Blender, Cinema 4D, UE4, 3ds Max, Modo, or slightly more specialized programs like Katana, Mari, Nuke, etc. Most of the "learning curve" is just finding out what a particular program calls one tool or another. I think this video starts to illustrate what I mean
Also, at studios, you tend to hear about the "main" pipeline where the majority of the work flows through. There are often secondary, smaller pipelines where they evaluate new tools and workflows before committing to entire rewrites. I would agree that small to medium sized studios don't have the resources or luxury to do as much exploration
Every CGI toolset has its strengths and weaknesses depending on the project. Also while the knowledge transfers between each software, they each have their own unique implementations for just about everything. It's hell to learn a new CGI toolset.
For work and also hobby I create 3D animations and experiment with all sorts of things in Maya. A recent turning point was using Redshift to render everything and suddenly I can do overnight GPU renders at high quality. Here are some of my projects released using a CC license -
> Their content is so profitable that the people in charge don't really give a fuck.
This is usually a general technology smell. Consistent, profitable revenue is the technological equivalent of the resource curse [0].
I haven't figured out if it's because people never get fired (thus new ideas are extremely slow to penetrate and propagate) or because management can afford to be extremely conservative (no pressure, resistance to change).
Put the most charitably, it's because there's no need to be more efficient, and stability & consistency is more valuable than improvement.
> It's going to take a decline in the field of animation before studios realize that they're basically stuck in 2006 in terms of how their artists are working to make their content.
I’m pretty sure there has been a huge decline in feature animation in the United States. VFX and feature production has almost collapsed here, with much of it moving to places that offer subsidies and cheaper labor for this kind of work, like Canada, Europe, and India.
To answer your question, the field has been sloooowly diversifying in some ways, as you say with Unreal (particularly since Unreal's engine is fast and good for real-time previews), but I don't see a huge push for moving away from does-it-all packages like Maya or 3DS Max. The economic incentive isn't there. Studios have figured out how to make their money and are comfortable with the pipelines that they already have. This isn't to say their pipelines are good. In fact, many of you would be shocked at just how bad most animation pipelines are at big studios. Not only are they way too vendor-locked (as is kind of the case with Maya), but they don't want to pay an adequate salary for qualified software engineers who can build better pipelines and write more software that's agnostic. Of course, I'm making sweeping generalizations, but this is the kind of story I've heard more often than not. Pixar is known for having good practices and they write (and sell) their own software, but I don't closely know anyone who has worked there.
It's going to take a decline in the field of animation before studios realize that they're basically stuck in 2006 in terms of how their artists are working to make their content. I won't mention them here, but people at certain major studios have been trying to get things like Unreal for 10+ years and never get approval to receive licenses for it and they never do because higher ups don't believe they'd see a monetary return on investment. Their content is so profitable that the people in charge don't really give a fuck.
In case I didn't make it clear, I'm pretty much an outsider at this point, so I'm sure there may be some more relevant viewpoints here that would contradict mine. I don't intend to be authoritative.