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Lightwieght, but if you have five minutes good read
(http://boingboing.net/2013/06/03/long-live-real-fake-fx.html#more-233303)

you didn't post the article

http://boingboing.net/2013/06/03/long-live-real-fake-fx.html (http://boingboing.net/2013/06/03/long-live-real-fake-fx.html)

Wierd... Here you go

"As research continues and solutions and awareness develop," he said, "CG will become indistinguishable from actual photography."

They were saying that 20 years ago.  And they'll probably be saying that 20 years from now.

People say that, but even then, it's only talking about the top of the line stuff. 

Not everyone has the talent of the budget to be top of the line.  It's true for practical effects and it's true for digital effects. 

The difference is, when dealing with practical effects, even if it's bottom of the barrel low-quality stuff, it still has a reality to it that CG doesn't.   

Agreed. As advanced as CG is nowadays, it is still easily distinguishable by most moviegoers. I think a lot of the problem is the high definition of film in this age. Perhaps if we were still watching films on antiquated screens or tube televisions with low resolutions, the CG would blend in better with reality. But the effects companies seem incapable at present of rendering the models to exactly match that of the characters or backgrounds filmed on set. Not to mention the fact that the subtle movements of a living breathing body are so hard to replicate. I think it was probably best achieved in King Kong.

Often CGI looks more like a painting than anything real, but something makes me wonder if this is caused by my expectations:

Once the movie theater had trailors for some of ABC's up-coming TV series.  I thought they were on real sets, but when they cut to a behind-the-scenes shot, most of the backgrounds were green.  Now, it's hard to see errors in a short shot, and the backgrounds were often in soft focus, but I must give the CG folks credit; they tricked me.   I know that a monster isn't really there, but an everyday object?  I don't know if I can always tell the difference anymore.  :bluesad:

Also, the space ships in Star Wars were not done in stop motion.

Yeah there's just a million little things that the human eye picks up on - the subtleties of movement, the shadows, the brightness of the colors and the contrast between them depending on the specific lighting conditions, etc.  If something isn't perfect it sticks out like a sore thumb.  And even if they do a great job with all of that, the physics are usually unrealistic.  They like to use CGI for car chases and that sort of thing, but it seems that instead of studying video of real cars and trying to replicate that, they just try to make it look "cool" and it usually ends up making me chuckle.  Or some giant dragon with bulletproof armor floating gracefully in midair, even though it would fall out of the sky like a rock if it didn't keep its wings flapping furiously at all times.

I agree with Pacman000 about everyday objects though.  I was listening to the director's commentary track on some movie and he was pointing out a lot of things that were CGI that I never would have noticed.  For instance they dug a pit that was 3 feet deep, but then they hit ground water and couldn't go any farther.  So they used CGI to make the pit 10 feet deep, and that blended in absolutely seamlessly.  And a whole bunch of other stuff like that as well.

I still stand by the notion that special effects should always be attempted by any practical way first. Then, and only then, once no practical method can successfully accomplish the effect in question should CGI be implemented.   

The Hellboy movies went overboard (in a good way) on hiding the CGI from the practical effects.   The making of features we're really amazing to watch.   They made rubber monsters for him to hit, for example, then CGI'd to make it look cooler and move.