That means that if can surely be used for 3D games as well.
That means that if can surely be used for 3D games as well.
It's a different problem domain. An effects system for movies will have tons of configurable knobs and parameters, allowing the artist to tweak it so it's exactly right for that shot. Some of these settings will produce interesting and gorgeous effects, but they're designed to allow maximum customizability. If the system has some artifacts in particular situations, they can easily be worked around by tuning some knobs, adjusting the camera angle, etc. Hell, you can even paint in 2d over the final output frame.
In a game, the effects have to look good from all angles and in all situations - many of which you don't know in advance. When I wrote a cloth simulation for a game, most of my time wasn't spend developing the core sim (which took all of an hour or two), but actually spent making sure the cloth behaved appropriately under all circumstances - even when the player would make sudden, exaggerated movements and animations (some of which weren't even physically possible).
Those real-time versions for modelling packages tend to be really rough approximations using the same code, and not worth the time it would take to optimize for a real, resource-restricted environment like a gaming console.
Even gaming consoles are limited by the number of polygons they can render, so the physics engine, if running in a game, wouldn't have to consider all the approximation points that were used to generate the high res renders at the start of the video for instance.