Not if they have to do close-ups on the faces. If you saw the movie "Gravity", you saw a movie that was almost completely rendered in CGI, except for one thing - the faces. Recognising faces is one of the first things we learn as infants, so it is awefully hard to fool us with CGI It's one of those things that folks who do CGI and similar stuff are well aware of. They can do a pretty good job, but ultimately, folks can tell the difference between a real face and a rendered one. It's easier to do with stills, because many visual cues are lacking in a still, that will be instantly recognisable in a 'real' image.
The pic above is from a video game. If the same model and textures were reimported to 3DS and rendered in proper lighting, I think shed look completely real.
I disagree. She'd be close, but no cigar. I've yet to see a rendered face that didn't look at least somewhat 'cartoony'' There is a lot of work going on though, in bringing this kind of thing to 'life'. I suspect they'll eventually be able to make characters that you can't distinguish between CGI and live action. They are still a few years down the road from that.
The tech is there but with movies it’s a cost/benefit ratio.
Take “lydia’ above. The 3d Model is dead on. It’s the details of the textures/mapping that would be the issue.
Her textures are 4000x4000 pixels because to go higher rez would take a lot of memory and CPU to render at 30 FPS video framerate. And she still looks pretty good.
If you jack up the texture resolution, thats all it takes. The lighting render tricks like subsurface scatter and the rest are all there now. the hardware is there now. But time is money. If Hollywood isn’t making it real yet it’s a cost thing. But it CAN be done if the animator/artist has the skill.