Did life ever get any better than the late 2000s? Yeah, sure, there was the financial crash and all that, but oh boy did CGI look good. Pirates of the Caribbean, Avatar, Transformers, District 9. They all looked years ahead of their time, whereas today even blockbusters with hundreds of millions of dollars poured in can look a bit cheap by comparison. Why is that?
Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski has somewhat of an answer, but Epic Games might want to plug their ears. "I think the simplest answer is you've seen the Unreal gaming engine enter the visual effects landscape. So it used to be a divide, with Unreal Engine being very good at video games, but then people started thinking maybe movies can also use Unreal for finished visual effects. So you have this sort of gaming aesthetic entering the world of cinema," he explained to But Why Tho?
"I think that's why those Kubrick movies still hold up, because they were shooting miniatures and paintings, and now you've got this different aesthetic. It works with Marvel movies where you kind of know you're in a heightened, unrealistic reality. I think it doesn't work from a strictly photo-real standpoint," Verbinski continued. He also said that UE doesn't react to subsurface, scattering, and light the same way as other means of making CG. A lot of it is "done for speed," he believes.
It's not all Unreal Engine's fault, though, as Verbinski explains there's problems at the executive level, too. "And then just what's become acceptable from an executive standpoint, where they think no one will care that the ships in the ocean look like they're not on the water. In the first Pirates movie, we were actually going out to sea and getting on a boat," he said.
Overall, Verbinski believes Unreal Engine replacing Maya as the main CGI fundamental is "the greatest slip backwards." Do you agree with his sentiment?
UPDATE: Following Verbinski's comments, Gamereactor received the following statement from Pat Tubach, VFX Supervisor at Epic Games:
"It's inaccurate for anyone in the industry to claim that one tool is to blame for some erroneously perceived issues with the state of VFX and CGI. It's true that there are a lot more people making computer graphics than ever before, and with that scale comes a range of successes and failures - but aesthetic and craft comes from artists, not software.
Unreal Engine is primarily used for pre-visualization, virtual production, and in some cases final pixels. I can guarantee that the artists working on big blockbuster VFX films like Pirates of the Caribbean 10-15 years ago could only dream about having a tool as powerful as Unreal Engine on their desks to help them get the job done—and I should know—I was one of them!"
This clears up the matter, providing some additional detail on why and how UE is used in VFX nowadays. It's apparent that no one resource can be pinned down as the reason behind some CGI not always looking the part. We're not quite sure it'll persuade Mr. Verbinski, but we'll have to wait and see.