Overton window of quality shifting - 2000s movies being praised
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To counter that, I'd say for the good examples you give, like Pirates and LotR, they still look horrible compared to the T-Rex CGI in Jurassic Park.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc_i5TKdmhs
2:13 in the video.
That's the best blatant CGI blending into the scene ever got and it was the early 90s.
In Lord of the Rings, the Mines of Morla where they're fighting that giant troll thing, it looks like a video game. Likewise for the Balrog.
Same with Pirates of the Carribean and the skeleton CGI scenes, not one movie has come close to blending CGI well with the overall look of the scene as Jurassic Park.
Which means that in order to use CGI effectively you need to be Steven Spielberg, put an inordinate amount of effort, time, money, artistry in it and apparently it's not worth it to do that as even a perfectionist like Peter Jackson who made background orcs have realistic chain-mail couldn't make the fight against that giant troll in the mines of morla look like it's not a video game.
To be fair, the context for the trex’s shot make it the perfect candidate for CGI. Dark scene, minimal lighting, and there is rain. That can hide a lot of imperfections in the effect. Add to the fact that it was probably one of a small handful of shots they needed to animate something of that and the quality makes sense.
Technically... it was a bit more involved than that: it was a 3D model based on photoscans of a full-size real life animatornic T-Rex:
https://youtu.be/B4J9TBlFxAg
You could technically say it was one of the earliest proto-concepts of photogrammetry.
The CGI was also animated based on the kinematics of the animatronic (similar to rotoscoping), which is why it moved so well and looked so good.
CGI based on practical effect puppets/animatronics are always far superior to just CGI rendered objects (since they have real-to-life reference modeling to draw from).
It's why even when some films opt for night time shots with minimal lighting or rain it still looks very uncanny (i.e., the recent Planet of the Apes movies).
Dang. I didn’t know that. Thank you for sharing!