Take a look at the earlier concepts / renderings for Shrek! Before the studio gutted the team(?) and told everyone to pull their heads in. Absolutely off-putting.

No kidding, Shrek probably had to do with 100x less computing (per hour) than a modern production. First Toy Story probably something like 1000x less computing

We did come a long way

Great example of how accumulated technical innovations unlock unexpected opportunities. Flow, Shrek and Toy Story have roughly similar technical quality but vastly different price tags. That cost reduction allows more experimentation, which delivers more compelling outcomes.

It's kind of surprising to go back and watch Toy Story in 4k today - the rendering really is quite rudimentary compared to what even video games put out now.

But - you have to be paying attention to see it, because Pixar knew the limitation of their systems. For example, rendering of the time made everything look plasticy, so they rendered ... plastic toys as the main characters! The most noticeable graphical issues are with the rendering of people, but those are put in the background.

What do people mean with technically impressive? There are Blender renders that look quite incredible though and you just cannot differentiate it from real picture anymore

Example: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58586fa5ebbd1a...

There are probably some flaws here as well, but you need to study the picture in detail. And Flow used the fast renderer of Blender, not the quality one.

Still, it does have a unique style that is much more interesting than many other animated movies. So what is technically impressive, just throwing more compute at it to make it photorealistic?

I think art style will have a larger impact. In a way it is technically impressive as it didn't need a lot of compute power.

I think people are specifically referring to the movie not looking technically impressive, not that Blender isn't capable of technically impressive renders at all.

Blender comes with two renderers: Cycles for production rendering, and Eevee for near-real time preview.

This movie was rendered with the latter.

Like any 3D package, you can also install other renderers.

So any perceived deficit in picture quality here is more to do with budget than some limitation of Blender.

Yeah, the real time stuff is pretty solid in blender but for very high image quality / realistic prerendering, blender is still missing a lot of the professional/proprietaries tools that gives the last 10% of polish in big budget productions (photorealism). The community has done a great job in last 10 years but there's still a lot of technical tools locked behind something like max/maya ecosystems professional paywall that most people eventually transitions to for "serious" industry work because pipelines are hard to change. At least that's the state a few years ago.

there are parts of Flow that definitely look incredible imo