I agree with Dave also. We don't need super realizm, although many people seem to want it; we need functional animation in a program that is fun to use. The reason I showed these images was not to disappoint people, but to show the capabilities of our hardware. Many of these images were generated on systems similar to our gaming rigs. Many of them may however have high-end CAD video cards which have much of the drawing primatives built in. This saves on the calculations for lighting and geometry.
The programs used to create these images start in the 2k range and up. Many of them also use separate rendering engines which are plug-ins into programs such as Maya, Max, World-Builder, etc. The rendering engines themselves are also very expensive. I saw one listed on the internet at $1900 for a 10 month license. That, by the way, was per machine cost so if you had a render farm with 20 machines that would be awefully expensive.
As you all noticed, these are not animation frames. World Builder does create animations, and I have used the program which is extremely slow. Many of the high-end creators, use render farms to generate animations so each machine picks up a bit of the task list and generates the frame images. Later on the images are stitched together to make the actual movie. This is quite unlike what we do in Trainz which is done in real time. To have real time animation, at the resolutions shown in the images, we would need super-computers on every desktop. This is not only cost prohibitive but is also extremely unrealistic today because there are no games with this kind of imaging in real time. Some people will say otherwise, but show me a dynamic and environment with this. Those programs that have the so-called realistic animated environments, have canned scenes where nothing changes and the lighting and shadows are baked into place.
John
