The parent poster is correct though. "Disengagement rate" is the term used in the industry, and what would get you results in google searches.
"Disconnect rate" is not what it's called, so it's helpful to correct that.
“ 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.
I replied on the original thread too, but I wonder if it’d work to use a mipmapped dither texture in texture space like this old hatching paper: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.28....
It probably won’t give you exact 1 pixel dither without some hacks, but maybe something along those lines could work.
One of San Francisco's problems, from the perspective of being appealing to outsiders, is that there are a few small areas with lots of homeless and the other problems you describe. And those also happen to be the main areas visited by tourists, and people coming to the city for conferences: Civic Center, Tenderloin, Downtown, South of Market. But the vast majority of the city is more residential and much more livable. Of course it has the problems of any big city, but in my day to day life living here I manage to almost always avoid all of the problems you mention. I live on a tree-lined street a couple blocks from a park with a playground. I havnt been to fishermans wharf in basically my entire life. Locals just dont go there because we know its a terrible tourist trap.
It actually can be a very pleasant city with a lot to offer. There is a reason housing in SF is so desirable and why tech companies want to be located there. I wish it could be made more obviously appealing to the casual tourist though, because we're giving ourselves a bad rep.
I think a better analogy are all the assistants and apprentices that worked in the larger Renaissance studios. They produced work in the style of the masters, or duplicated their works, but they weren't doing original work, and are mostly forgotten today. Are they doing art? Or are they just craftsmen?
I dint think it's about patronage.. most professional artists today have some form of patronage. I think it's a distinction between how much freedom that patronage gives you to do what you want vs realize someone else's vision.
The digital artists at big studios that he's talking about are micromanaged precisely like this. I think concept artists maybe have more freedom for creativity, but the majority of artists in animation and film graphics are constantly being told to make shades lighter and change shapes arbitrarily. A lot of the job is learning how to be flexible to appease those who are in charge.
I am a visual effects animator at one of the major VFX studios, and did not go to art school so I am one of these self-taught graphic artists. And I totally agree with what you're saying here. I don't consider what I do to be art. It is highly-skilled craft with a lot of specialized technique. But I am not personally creating meaning in any way. The filmmakers and directors who bring us projects might be artists, but I am just a cog in a large machine which produces their vision.
I also work with many people who did go to art school and I can say that in general they have a better understanding of fundamentals like color theory and composition than those who did not. Also often a better approach to tackling creative problems. I frequently find myself wishing I'd hard those years of formal instruction.. It would make some things a lot easier.
Again, I would wager that you have seen many, many shots on TV and in movies which were fully, 100% CG already. You just didn't notice because they really were indistinguishable. We've definitely already crossed that boundary in many areas, and the main things which still stand out is just bad work.
I work in film vfx, and if you think we dont compare our rendered images to real photographs and video constantly, then you dont really know how modern graphics are produced. We shoot reference for everything, and use things like gonioreflectometers to sample real world BSDFs. Yes, lighting models are always necessarily simplified from the real world physics. But the thing is that 99% of the time that doesnt matter, because most common types of surfaces are able to be reproduced accurately enough to fool the majority of people. I would wager that most of the CG things you see these days on TV or in movies you have no idea was CG.. it's only the bad stuff (or obviously impossible) that stands out.
I actually am a bit confused what you are arguing here.. all of these problems you're mentioning have been well-understood by graphics researchers for the past couple decades.
Why are people getting bent out of shape about the word "unique"? It is unique because Jupiter has features that we have not observed on any other planet, some of which are mentioned in the article (different types of storm systems, high altitude clouds casting shadows etc). From context, he is clearly not only talking about Saturn's hexagon. This pedantry is ridiculous.
It does tease with hidden information by making you want to read the article to see what "this disease" is. And the "unstoppable" bit, while true, reads as very sensationalist.
A less clickbaity title might be something like: "The Sudden Oak Death fungus has killed a million trees in California, and is no longer stoppable". Or something like that.. I'm no journalist.
There are only so many jobs to be had at ILM and Pixar, and its been a while since I've checked but I think ILM is mostly hiring for its studios in London, Vancouver and Singapore.
Also there are a lot of really nice parts that you wouldn't typically see on a brief visit, both in the city and surrounding area.
The homeless are definitely a real problem but in my day to day life I somehow manage to avoid it almost always. We don't all live south of market or in the mission.