So the deadline aspect I completely understand, if you don’t have enough time you can’t make the best product.
But I don’t understand how the budget factors into the quality. For example Antman 3 has a budget x20 bigger than Godzilla M1 and it looks infinitely worse.
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The CGI (or more broadly special effects) budget also determines how many people can work on the CGI for how many hours. As you said, if you don’t have enough time, you can’t make it look as good.
But budget isn’t everything. It also depends on how the movie was shot and what demands are being placed on the CGI department. Some productions expect everything that didn’t work out during shooting to be “fixed in post”. Things are visible in the shot that shouldn’t be? Just get the CGI people to digitally remove it. The actor has a mustache in the shot but the character shouldn’t? Just get CGI to remove it. The actor should be wearing a different costume? Get CGI to insert it. And so on. Also, CGI works much better if it is already planned for during shooting. E.g. CGI artists can deliver much better work if they have good reference footage that tells them how the lighting would interact with an object they are meant to insert into the shot, or how water would respond to it, etc. The more you leave for the CGI department to just figure out from scratch, the harder it is and the more time it will take to do well (if it is even possible).
Also, it’s not always obvious what effects are the hardest to pull off. Human faces, for instance, are notoriously difficult to get right, in part because we have so much experience looking at them in real life, so we can tell when something is even a tiny bit off. Whereas, a big hulking lizard monster… that’s not something you see every day. Who’s to say whether the texture of its scales or the way it moves are dead-on? So sometimes what seems like a big set-piece expensive CGI shot is actually cheaper than something that, as a viewer, you might not even notice was CGI.
And, related to the previous two points: you can set yourself up for success by how you shoot the scenes that are supposed to have the monster (or other big, complicated effect) in it. If you shoot long takes of the monster in broad daylight, on a still camera, in a wide shot, in a complex environment, that’s much harder to render and composite convincingly than if you have the monster in a darker, simpler environment, with brief, dynamic shots that often show only partial views in close rather than the whole thing.
This is how well-planned productions that consult with their CGI department from the beginning can get a small CGI budget to go much further than sloppier productions that expect their CGI people to just magically make the movie they failed to get on the day.
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