So much iteration time can go into attempting to get the right "shape" of the simulation, as well as "colours" (smoke, combustion, flame), whether via a black-body spectral shader or a more artist-driven one, and it's very difficult to get people to agree on what looks "real" or "right", especially compared to say hard-surface rendering.
Doing it practically (assuming the correct scale, and fuels were used) might (depending on directors and producers' opinions) make people "just" accept that the result is "realistic", and remove a lot of the uncertainty, at the very least just because they can't tweak things afterwards, and what was recorded is the result they get, as opposed to having a team of 10s of people iterating for months (including lots of compute time for simulations and rendering) trying to get something the people at the top are happy looks "real".
To be honest, the non-CG crash scene in the snippets that I've seen looked off too. Random fireballs starting in random locations.
Now when reality gets influenced by fiction, ISIS actually used bombs that make a lot of flames, more than necessary for warfare, just to make their propaganda videos similar to the Hollywood movies their recruiting targets have been watching all their life.
I am sure recruiting videos could just as well use CGI if they wanted to. Likely anyway does, skifull editing and manipulation are required for any propoganda content anyway.
All the graphics / VFX knowledge I now have is self-taught (other than learning off colleagues) as well as experience working in the industry.
I'd say learning how to program is a good starting point, if you are really interested in graphics it's probably a good idea move into low-level programming (C,C++,CUDA) that's used in the HPC realm, because often the code will need to be extremely optimised. However, you can still do cool things in a higher-level language.
Thanks a bunch for your output :)
There are quite a few angles of it exploding, as well as it being a major set piece with people running around it before, during, and after the explosion.
The real question is if the movie could have been done with fewer angles and interior shots.
I would not underestimate this cost.
It's typically much cheaper to do anything like a plane crash in a computer (or models + computer). Even 20 years ago, when I was bidding visual effects, I bet it would have been cheaper. [Note, I haven't seen the movie, so maybe there are 50 angles of it exploding, in which case it might not be]
The cost of a mothballed plane is probably trivial compared to the daily cost of Tenet's movie set. You've got all of the actors (or maybe stunt people in this case) and crew members, so their salaries, food, hotels, costs of being on location and so on. The cost of renting the location itself. Constructing things you're going to destroy, cleaning up, etc.
My guess is that Nolan wanted to do it this way because it's more fun. Nolan knows it's cheaper to do it in CGI, but blowing stuff up in CGI is boring. He gets to sit in a desk chair and look at something blowing up on a screen instead of seeing it IRL. And he can call the shots because he's Nolan, he directed, wrote and produced the thing.