Re: Full CGI has come a long way
Yes, this is very good work. The artist definitely has an excellent grasp on the fundamentals of photography, which he's leveraged to make this as realistic as possible. 3D rendering has come a long way in the last 10 years or so primarily for two reasons: computers' increasing floating point and memory performance and the emergence of approximated simulation algorithms.
This is important because the most accurate ways of rendering geometry realistically has required extremely float point and memory intensive raytracing functions. But outside of the scientific arena, physical accuracy isn't needed. Honestly, in the movie visual effects work one rule is king: "if it looks right it is right." So in the last 10 years there's been a push away from "faking" things and instead introducing pseudo-accurate simulations. For example, in the 90s lighting in computer graphics was pretty simple. If you created the geometry of a room with a window and added a bright light outside, it wouldn't illuminate the inside of the room. So we'd have to do things like add invisible lights inside to fake the idea of light bouncing around in the room. Nowadays we use HDRI and Global Illumination techniques to fairly accurately simulate the way light bounces around a scene and color bleeds from one surface to another.
This pseudo-simulated approach has grown in other areas like optics and animation. We used to have to fake the way a lens works to create distortion around the edges or depth of field, but now it can be controlled fairly easily with realistic results. We also use fluid simulations regularly to drive the realistic motion of everything from embers from a fire, smoke from a volcano or crashing ocean waves.
No, computers don't do all the work - it still requires LOTS of skills, patience and artistic ability, but this animation is a good example of many of those techniques put to use in a very elegant way.
