AI isn't replacing CGI — it's changing what CGI is for
After 15 years and 1,000 projects, I no longer think AI is going to replace 3D studios. It's going to make them ten times more useful.
I've spent the last 15 years modelling, lighting and rendering. The first 10 of those, every render took a day. The last 5, every render takes hours. The next 5, every render will take seconds — but we'll make 100× as many.
What changed
Diffusion models, fine-tuned on a brand's existing imagery, can produce variations indistinguishable from a fully ray-traced output, in a tenth of the time. The key word is 'variations'. Not 'generation from nothing'. The base hero is still hand-crafted.
What the studios that survive will look like
Not AI-only shops (the output is too generic). Not traditional-only shops (the cost structure is dead). The survivors will be hybrids — senior craft on the master shot, AI for everything that scales from it.
What this means for clients
Catalogues that used to refresh once a year can refresh once a month. Variation depth that used to cost £80k per season costs £8k. The brands that figure this out before their competitors will own the visual side of e-commerce for the next five years.
