The answer is YES, you can do a movie like Avengers in Blender.
On aspect of too many faces. like most other tools, they use Normal maps. They do a face scan of the person and then retopology the face with Normals to keep the face details. And seeing some scenes will few millions of polygons by some artists (in Blender) I do not see this to be an actual issue.
IN general, if Blender like all other tools has it’s limits, and it is the art director’s role to ensure these issues are either mitigated (internal development of needed tools) or skipped, by reworking the shots, or even painstaking manual adjustments.
Large companies have the funds for the render farms needed to render the scene. so even a 36h render per frame time is a “non issue”. And blender can handle quite a few polygons, so again I do not see any issues there.
Looking at the quality from Laundrymat shows that render quality is on par to other tools, and that is a very small team. Unlike the 300+ teams on movies like Avengers.
IN the end, I feel the question is pointless. I seen work from Microsofts PAINT tool be better then some with Photoshop. It is all about dedication and limitations of imagination. The limitation of tools is again driven by limitations of imagination.
Side part, there were few statements here “in the future” feature such and such should be there. Don’t go by that. Seeing the limited funding Blender has, some features are either way way off (decades?) or will never show unless someone (or studios) invest their time/money into developing the tool an sharing the results with the rest of us.
That’s not the same thing the in-house tools been used by the big studios are using finite elements or finite volumes to simulate the contraction and relaxation of muscles,the layers of fat and skin sliding about. The are based on the science of how muscles contract and relax etc.
That add-on is just what someone jerry-rigged and is just based on artistic appearance and taste it can work on simple stuff but try that on a humanoid and you would be in the uncanny valley pretty quickly.
here is a vid explaining Weta’s tissue system
I think ILM who did Hulk has probably something similar. In one of their videos the also briefly mentioned that when the animator does the facial animation they run simulations on top of that to get all the facial muscles and skin sliding right.
How would you be able to do a cinematic Hulk without those kind of tools at hand.
I would have to agree with ideasman42 that it wouldn’t be practical to do one of these kinds of movies with just off-the-shelf tools not just Blender.
Blender on its own is a very capable package, but if you want to get somewhere you’ll need to broaden your horizon and see witch tool is best for the job. If you’re a 3D artist, only knowing 1 package is downright crippling.
Avengers wasn’t made with “a” software. Avengers was made with a huge pile of softwares and separate tools. If you ask if Blender could be the “main” software, the answer would be: no. Could Blender be a part of the softwares used in making a Avengers movie, the answer would be: yes.
As it is today not even Houdini or Maya can handle the complexity of the scenes. That’s why Clarisse and Katana (and Gaffer) is growing in popularity. Today most pipelines are built so that you have one main hub that is collecting the caches and rendering out that.
If it would have been a bit easier to implement Blender in pipelines I think we would see a lot more usage. But since Blender is so cutting edge when it comes to scripting (Python 3) and not being based on Qt and doesn’t work that much with environment variables, it gets tricky to implement. To have a common ground so that it’s easier for Studios to write tools which might be compatible with each other (both commercial tools and in-house tools) many follow the VFX Platform
