Hey,
I've not posted in here in years but this thread caught my eye. Some interesting thoughts.
"I work for an Architectural firm, we are about 400 employees with two Viz artist LOL, I am the Sr Viz person, my boss, creative director, anyone else are designers, architects that also do renderings. "
I think all that there spells it out, really. Working in-house at an architects practice is extremely limiting in terms of one's creative or even technical freedom. I would suppose that most of the time you're being asked to visualise someone's evolving design, constantly make changes and... that's where it ends usually, I guess? It's a VERY different beast to being a visualiser in a visualisation studio, especially one that focuses on marketing. In many ways it's almost a completely different industry. Producing visuals for marketing is VERY different to producing visuals for planning. And both are drastically different to producing visuals for internal design development approval.
I think you might be focusing on the wrong thing. Instead of being concerned about software and technological change leaving you by and where the industry is going, perhaps you should look at your end goal - where you personally are going. Who and what are you producing your images for? What do you get out of it? What can you bring to the industry? Keeping up with tech change is essential, totally, but in the end the tools are not the critical thing. Pile-em-high-stack-em-cheap will reap the benefits of real-time as they can *** out a load of basic visuals in no time at all for a decent short-term profit - more power to them! The industry absolutely NEEDS those companies to allow the higher end outfits to shine through. The trick is to compete at the right level.
It's the age-old problem of commercial arch-viz. We're all artists, yes, but we're producing commercial work for corporate clients in the end (mostly). It's not just a free-for-all splurge of unbridled creativity and narrative and wild experimentation and R&D into new software and techniques. Finding an environment where you can apply some of those things, or maybe even all of them, even in a small way in your daily work, yet in a commercially viable way - that's the dream, I think... We come across a great many young artists who are fiercely hungry to unleash their creativity but struggle with the commercial side of the industry. It's hard! And it takes most people years to find the right balance that satisfies the artist, their employer and their clients. And I'm not just talking about in-house artists but creative leads, freelancers, studio founders - all of us.
From a business POV, competing at the low end is easy - being cheap you're always going to be busy. Competing in the middle is VERY tough, as it's extremely hard to differentiate and offer something unique to clients. Competing at the higher end is therefore somewhat easier, counter to what most people might imagine. When you're not really competing on price any more it's all about service, connections and offering something unique to the client - why come to you instead of these other guys? Style choice is one major element, and that relies on super strong and confident art direction and a really, really solid studio culture. That takes time to nurture too.
And when you look at the leading respected studios around the world, they are NOT alike. The work they produce is unique to them, their workflows aren't the same, their people/attitudes/studio life is not the same, their clients are not the same.. it's a very interesting time for the industry, in a good way. There's a lot of innovation happening, a lot of looking back too - overlooked techniques and styles are coming back into fashion (as Art Maknev said) - lots of opportunities. The most successful artists and studios will be the ones who can leverage that while remaining commercially viable.