Archived FIE LLC Website for the Twenty Twenties
Most CGI riggers are taught about a thing called a forearm roll. It’s in many books. Someone likely teaches them some kind of simple way to build it into their rigs.
They think they’ve got it. But when it goes through production, it breaks. And usually, they then put in a switch to “turn it off” so that animators can fix/animate it manually.
Texturing and modeling are now very much intertwined. One only needs to look at zBrush or Mudbox to see the reality of high density asset generation.
The secret to good photo-real rendering is in the math and science of the shader and how it renders.
The problem, is that most of the time, the person you want doing the modeling, is not the person you want doing the shading.
It makes no sense to disqualify an extremely talented asset artist because he/she doesn’t understand the intricacies of color gamut mapping, or the proper definition of a bi-directional reflectance distribution function (BRDF).