[esmevane]

It's always played out like this in software, by the way. Famously, animation shops hoped to save money on production by switching over to computer rendered cartoons. What happened instead is that a whole new industry took shape, and brought along with it entire cottage industries of support workers. Server farms required IT, renders required more advanced chips, some kinds of animation required entirely new rendering techniques in the software, etc.

A few hundred animators turned into a few thousand computer animators & their new support crew, in most shops. And new, smaller shops took form! But the shops didn't go away, at least not the ones who changed.

It basically boils down to this: some shops will act with haste and purge their experts in order to replace them with LLMs, and others will adopt the LLMs, bring on the new support staff they need, and find a way to synthesize a new process that involves experts and LLMs.

Shops who've abandoned their experts will immediately begin to stagnate and produce more and more mediocre slop (we're seeing it already!) and the shops who metamorphose into the new model you're speculating at will, meanwhile, create a whole new era of process and production. Right now, you really want to be in that second camp - the synthesizers. Eventually the incumbents will have no choice but to buy up those new players in order to coup their process.

[rendaw]

And 3D animation still requires hand animation! Nobody starts with 3D animation, the senior animators are doing storyboards and keyframes which they _then_ use as a guide for 3D animation.