I've found a useful website where a visual effects supervisor called Kim Libreri looked at the current trends and projects the future paths of the VFX industry. He made twelve predictions on what the future holds for visual effects;
1. Build a better virtual human.
Companies have sub-surface scattering, measured skin and material shading models, real world sampled lights and sophisticated hair styling and rendering systems, therefore are able to make realistic virtual human beings.
2.Create believable facial animation.
Although it is very difficult to make the exact facial expression as human beings due to many moving features, Industrial Lights and Magic has made a very expressive effect on 'The Hulk.'
This shows that someday, we will be able to make more realistic facial animation.
3.Create synthetic massive environments.
At the moment, artist has put a lot of effort and time in making very realistic environments. For the Matrix movies, for instance, they had to do a very careful previs of every detail of every shot in order to be able to understand what was needed to fabricate. There are predictions that someday a software will generate every building, tree, road or other element and would accurately reproduce the interaction of various lighting conditions, how the light hits each building, how it reflects off various different surfaces, how the light reflects back onto nearby objects. This will make things a lot easier for VFX artist since too much time and effort is being out into today's VFX.
4. Pipeline tools will become standardized.
5. Advances in digital VFX animation will mean far less physical effects work.
6. Off-site rendering will be the norm.
7. GPU power will change the post-production pipeline.
8. Movie/game conversion will become common.
Over the next five years sharing assets with game developers will happen more and more. This exchange will happen both ways: for example, as vfx technologies advance and computational power increases, game developers will use more film style vfx. This will allow for more data exchange with movies. Some movies use a game technology called Havoc as a rigid body dynamic solver on the Matrix sequels. That allowed them to use a digital stunt double for particularly nasty knocks.
Crossover tools will become more common in the future for purely practical reasons, but that will have obvious implications for movie/game tie-ins. One day we may even see truly integrated parallel development of games and movies.
9. Digital film capture and work flow will become the norm.
10. Digital distribution will change the way movies are released.
11. Globalization of VFX will have an unexpected price.
Studios could be sending more of their work overseas to Asia and other regions where labor costs are lower. This will cost the industry less money to make visual effects on films.
12. VFX work will change fundamentally from emulation to simulation.
The biggest revolution in VFX work will be a change in how the effect is created in the first place. Rather than recreating the appearance of things digitally, artist will be able to recreate the physics of movement, light etc. That data will be more powerful and inherently more flexible. Since it is three-dimensional information, directors and artists will have the freedom to adjust the angle of a shot, move in and out etc.
