"But if you look at great stuff being done by individuals today and compare it with what studios were doing a few years ago, the garage guys are measuring up well." Exactly. Liam Kemp's work on "This Wonderful Life" is a good example. Not a full-length feature, obviously, but still a great CG short. He started it in 2001, completed it in 2003. Considering even more advances have occured since then which may have aided his efforts, it's still a reasonable time frame for such a work, done by an individual from the modeling stage to final render. He's currently working on his second, titled "The Normals". Can't wait to see it. :-)

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.