When Reality Looks FAKE
Rashad Carter
Posts: 1,830
A buddy sent me this photo he took of an item he is carting on his pickup truck in upstate New York. He added the caption, "Need a nut and bolt?"
After seeing Ant-Man I was convinced that this image was a special effect from the film. I told him it looked like a ridiculous 3d render.
So anyhow I just wanted to toss out there that even though the lighting, textures and modeling are all top notch...it just still doesnt look real..except that it is.
Anyone else have any ridiculously fake but truly real images to share?
Fun fun!
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Occasionally I look at the sky and it looks poorly composed, blown out, or obviously rasterized.
And then I'm like... oh, right.
The photo looks to be pretty poor quality so that might be why it doesn't look real to you.
fun Concept for a thread. Look forward to seeing what people come up with.
OK, then, Rashad. Many, many years ago, when I was staying in a bush camp, I rose one foggy morning and spotted a dew-covered orb spider web glistening in the light. I only had an Instamatic camera with me at the time (you'll have to look it up, kids), so I make no apologies for the image quality, but I snapped a shot of it. Later, when the photos had been developed, someone was looking through them when they exclaimed, "Wow! That thing can't really have been that big!" Puzzled, I looked to see what they were referring to, and suddenly realized what they were seeing. I hadn't noticed, perhaps because I took the picture and interpreted it for what it was, but serendipitously the shot at first glance seemed to show an immense web suspended from the trees that were in the photo. I'm not sure that I could have done that intentionally. :) (Of course, a closer, second look reveals the truth).
Or, how about this one. Here you can see a grey red squirrel on our bird feeder. The mother can be seen on the little green feeder behind. That was one of three grey offspring that she had that year (no, they were not albinos). First and last that I had ever seen or even heard of such a thing.
...not photoshopped. Spotted this while waiting at a bus sto and snapped a pic of it.
They are really good, haven’t seen a Zombie in ages!
Real, life size statue of Lucille Ball erected in her hometown. It was dubbed "Scary Lucy" and stood for several years before being replaced with a much more realistic statue.
For everyone googling, here is the difference, holy cow!
Edit : this is what happens if you apply to many facial morphs ;-)
That's like the love child of Lucille Ball and David Bowie.
Ha! Good one
I took this photo at a fashion party in Beverly Hills. Thought it was pretty funny considering what we all do... I think there's something wrong with my iPhone camera. Photos have been coming out crappy lately...
Not all of the effects in the film involving giant/shrunk items are CGI. They still use props they build too, to minimize the cost of doing all that CGI.....So if I saw that, I'd probably NOT think it was CG.
Many photos look CG because the lighting just happens to be awkward. Real life is like that, and sometimes the lighting for a photo isn't great......and it makes things look 'fake'. And then sometimes the lighting is so perfect it looks like it was done in a studio instead of an actual shot out in the environment.
You hit upon an aspect of brain psychology that is commonly encountered in photorealistic 3D. If even one aspect of the image seems unnatural our brains refuse it in its entirety. The shape and texture of the hardware look perfectly fine to me, but the scale is wrong for an everday obkject, so our brain considers the whole thing fake. Someone not working in 3D wouldn't be quick to think CGI, but they may think it's something else, like a wood replica..
In fact, large rusty bolts are pretty common in industry. While the bolt may be a sculpture it's entirely plausible as a real world object in the construction of steel ships, buildings, and bridges.
Anyway, the "piece out of place" rule is one reason an otherwise perfect photoreal render looks fake. Usually it's the expression or pose, or something about the lighting that upsets a logic center in the brain. This is the Uncanny Valley at work -- it looks SO real, but it's not quite, so we're unsettled at the result.
The reason why this looks fake to you, is because it is. That isn't a large bolt. it's a piece of art or more importantly, what an artist interperets what a giant bolt would look like. The artist in us can see that it isn't a thing that would adhere to the normal laws of nature. As artists, we have a better understanding of phyisics, angles, gravity, and other science principles than the average joe. For instance, the angle it is leaning is wrong. It would be steeper. You can also see supports. These plus other clues tell us something isn't right.
He has more pics on his instagram page:
https://www.instagram.com/davidtanych/
...also skin and hair. Getting realistic looking skin and hair seems to be a real challenge even given all the resources we have (there is even an ongoing thread about Skin in Iray that sometimes gets so technical it can go over the head).
The best I ever saw was last year when someone posted a pic of the Princess Leila character in the gallery (which Daz used on their site page fr a while). Turned out most of the "realism" was done in postwork.
The issue with 3D Hair is most of it is transmapped and rigged (to varying degrees). Some hair content ((partiularly long hair styles) tends to also distort unnaturally when certain poses or lengths are needed. Hair is very complex with a lot of layer depth, SSS, sheen, and translucency involved. Pixar developed custom software and build built the hardware needed just to model, render, and animate the hair for their Merida character (Brave) and that was still a "toon" based setting (when I attempted creating Merdia in Daz I ended up using two instances of Bolina Hair layered on top of, and somewhat intertwined with each other to get the thickness and depth I needed which made for a real pain when posing).
Strand based hair is incredibly meticulous to work with (I have both Garibaldi and LAMH) and neither can be used directly with Iray without converting to either .obj [Garibaldi] or Firbremesh [LAMH] which significantly increases polycount and render times particularly if you ant it to fall and pose in a "natural" fashion.
We shouldn't worry though, I'often ve seen in films where lighting, surfaces, reflections, shadows etc, on CGI elements and effects don't perfectly mesh with the realistic surroundings and RL characters, (some of the most noticeable being anything that involves particle physics like explosions) so even the big studios that have massive render farms and pour millions into CGI production have the same issues we do.
Just about all photos used on tourism sites with their artificially enhanced contrast and saturated colors and models fashion magazines look fake to my eyes.
Hm, I can't see any reason for why this should not be a real bolt, there's nothing odd about it technically. That it's turned into a piece of art is sort of irrelevant. As for the size, they make them even bigger, actually.
Also:
"The worlds largest bolts ever made were specially forged by the Penrith Engineering Works in Clydesdale Scotland in 1967. The bolts measured 27' 4" long each and had a diameter of 4' 2". Each bolt weighed 12.6 tonnes and a total of 60 of them were made. The bolts were made from the ultra hard and super strong metal IRIDIUM. The bolts were used to connect two oil tankers together as an experiment to increase bulk crude oil transport capacity of shipping company SWISSOIL.
Incredibly each bolt failed one by one when the ships were sailing up the English Channel and the experiment was deemed a failure because of torsional stress caused the bolts to fail. The two tankers were wrecked subsequently and no company has ever tried to bolt two oil tankers together again."
Six,
Those are both fantastic images! The web is indeed very impressive, and yes, head scratcher. The illusion of scale is almost too perfect to seem accidental. The White colored squirrel would have seemed implausible to me. I'd have seen it as a very good Garibaldi but would have wondered why the artist would have chosen such as unlikely color. Both of these images are compelling and relaxing. Very cool!
Kyoto,
Until this image I hadnt considered Zombie a pest problem as such, but on second thought maybe exterminators are the best for the job. Just so long as the zombies are treated with dignity and respect...
Wonderland,
Could well have been a promo for a Dforce enabled dress garment. The manequin, the pose, the shadows around the figure, the reflection of the tree in the water....this does an excellent job of making you wonder. Very very appropriate for this thread. Excellent submission. Thanks a ton.
Paintbox,
Scary Lucy! I can hear the screeching of the violins every time I look at this thing. Hugely improved on the second attempt. It's as if they got EVERYTHING about her wrong the first time. How is this possible?
Taoz,
That is fascinating information! I cannot help but to wonder what size of a screw driver one would need in order to turn one of these things. In fact how DO they do such things. I'll need to look this up. Human beings really are capable of amazing things. Thanks for this insight!
Dave230,
The plot thickens! So this guy makes super sized hand tools of all sorts....I love it! I'll need to continue searching for more stuff like this. I don't know why i find it interesting. I think its because if future civilizations find any of these artifacts, they will assume humans were 100 feet tall! We'd be the new dinosaurs
Double post
I think I once saw a chair and table somewhere that was way too big. It was a vague memory but a photo of that with a person next to it would look fake. I think it was a sculpture of a giant chair and table. I forgot where it was.
I wish I took pictures of somethings that made me think, is that real? or if I took them I had better backing up skills then and still have them now.
Yes, I've been watching a number of documentaries about the biggest constructions in the world, and it's sometimes hard to believe what they can do today and how big some of these things are.
When I worked not too far from the tunnel that was being built near Gotthard they took us on tour of the building site and the drill bits they were using to drill the tunnel through the mountain were the size of a 3 story building!
...
The west side rail tunnel boring machine.
Ha! Ditto for me.
Yeah I don't think those bolts were made out of iridium, considering iridium is rare as hell, like you don't mine for iridum, it is a byproduct of refining other metals, the only layer of the Earth that has enough iridium to "mine" would be the KT layer and that is so thin you wouldn't get much without mining it all around the entire Earth. Other than that "fact" I believe it.(besides it would cost more than building several tankers 1 quadrillion 692trillion and change just for the bolts if they could have used iridium (todays costs at 700 bucks an ounce and at the quoted 12.6 ton per bolt, though someone mentioned in another thrad where this was also mentioned (I only found iridium being used for the bolts in two places, neither had any sort of citations or proof of any kind) that they rounded wrong and each bolt should weigh 240 tons each which would make those bolts even MORE expensive. I think the iridium thing is something added by someone who thought it would be funny to make those bolts sound that much cooler)
Fake reality!...
Sorry... I couldn't resist.
Maybe "Naugareality"?...
About a month or more ago I went to NYC's Central Park with my family... By Bethesda Fountain there are some ornate architectural details that are part of a bridge over the grand stairway... I took this picture of an interesting detail I noticed...
I'm not sure if it's obvious, but a real bird made a nest around a stone bird... If you look on the right side of the fake bird, you can see the spot the real bird was nesting in.