Quote: "Other than the fact that we know it is before we start up the movie? I as an artist have an easy time differing CG from "real stuff", however every time I see an old movie I cringe at how extremely bad their stuff were."
We know it is CGI, but I can see signs of it being CGI, whilst they're very good and do help create a realistic feel, but it still feels like CGI. One of the issues with even good quality photo-realistic rendering (and I think it might be what Nate is touching on) and that's the imperfections that come with it. You can correct it with post-processing, which is what the guy I linked does. Scroll down to some of his baby renders, they look fantastic, but I don't see hollywood offering that level of detail.
In the link I posted there is a small CGI animation, which is done to a very convincing detail. But to a detail we don't see in movies.
Here's a render of a single frame, it is fantastic, at first watching the clip I thought, the cg effect is where the ground opens up, but nope the whole scene is CGI. Looking at this shot, I can still tell that the building is CGI, the rest, however, is very difficult. Whilst this level of photo-realism is possible, but I'd argue that we don't see it in Hollywood movies. I'm gonna say post processing has something to do with it and probably render times too.
You mentioned 2012, although the CGI was very impressive, it still looked like CGI to me.
