One of my hobbies is Houdini which is like Blender. While I agree with you that you can build a nice parameterised model in a few days - if you want to make an entire scene or a short film, you will need hundreds if not thousands of models, all textured and topolgized and many of them rigged, animated or even have simulations.

What this means is that making even a 2 minute short animation is out of reach for a solo artist. Your only option today is to go buy an asset pack and do your best. But then of course your art will look like the asset pack.

AI Tools like this reduce one of the 20+ stages down to something reachable by someone working solo.

> What this means is that making even a 2 minute short animation is out of reach for a solo artist.

Is it truly the duration of the result that consumes effort and the number of people required? What is the threshold for a solo artist? Is it expected that a 2 minute short takes half as much effort/people as a 4 minute short? Does the effort/people scale linearly, geometrically, or exponentially with the duration? Does a 2 minute short of a two entity dialog take the same as a 4 minute short of a monologue?

> Your only option today is to go buy an asset pack and do your best. But then of course your art will look like the asset pack.

What's more valuable? That you can create a 2 minute short solo or that all the assets don't look like they came from an asset pack? The examples shown in TFA look like they were procedurally generated, and customizations beyond the simple "add more vertexes" are going to take time to get a truly unique style.

> AI Tools like this reduce one of the 20+ stages down to something reachable by someone working solo.

To what end? Who's the audience for the 2 minute short by a solo developer? Is it meant to show friends? Post to social media as a meme? Add to a portfolio to get a job? Does something created by skipping a large portion of the 20+ steps truly demonstrate the person's ability, skill, or experience?

> Your only option today is to go buy an asset pack and do your best.

There is a real possibility the assets generated by these tools will look equally or even more generic, the same generated images today are full of tells.

> What this means is that making even a 2 minute short animation is out of reach for a solo artist.

Flatland was animated and edited by a single person. In 2007. It’s a good movie. Granted, the characters are geometric shapes, but still it’s a 90 minute 3D movie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland_(2007_Ehlinger_film)

Puparia is a gorgeous 2D animated film done by a single person in 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puparia

These are exceptional cases (by definition, as there aren’t that many of them), but do not underestimate solo artists and the power of passion and resilience.