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A funny thing about "photo-realism". Every now and then there's people that for some reason post photos to the DAZ gallery. They are easily spotted as they never look as good as the renders in the gallery.
LoL. I've noticed that as well.
And thanks Fastbike. That looks like it should work quite nicely on the eye problem. I've got it in my cart, and it will be mine come next payday.
One thing I've found adds a lot to photorealism is to get out of the habit of trying to simulate everything and think like a photographer.
'realistic lighting' often looks like muddled garbage. Photographers don't haul around piles of light and umbrellas because they need a workout.
(And I say this being someone who keeps falling into this trap; recent scene I did, I realized it looks great except the realistic lighting washes everything out and doesn't pop at all. Mutter)
For some things photorealism seems pointless though. The new Harley Quinn bundle that I purchased for NON-realistic renders will just end up looking, if used well with Iray, like a photo of a real girl doing Cosplay at Comic-Con, out to promote her own career as a model (which there are TONS of already, all over the Internet.) I never learned 3Delight so I can see I will need a lot postwork or toon shaders that I also haven't tried yet to make her toony or arty.
It's a cool trick to make photoreal people, but unless it's something really special, it's unlikely someone would purchase it to put on their wall. People still like ART. But if you are creating a photoreal image for commercial reasons (no need to hire a model, photographer, hair, makeup, etc...) then it's a great tool or I suppose for sexy/nude shots. I actually think it's good that no girl was coerced into taking her clothes off by a sleazy photographer. And a fun joke on guys if they find themselves sexually attracted to a non-existent girl. The guys here in LA are so sleazy, I consider it a fun payback to get them hot and bothered over a fake girl. Actually most of the girls in LA are pretty fake anyway LOL.
Lack of gravitational force kills realism a lot for me me. If I want to do a render where someone is lifting something it is tough to depict the strain asides from veins and some limited muscle movement. Also most people have some form of body fat and figures without that can seem mannequin like. Hair without movement morphs, mature figures without body hair, even feet that don't squash when the weight is put on them and the endless gravity defying breasts can really kill realism.
I don't really agree with this. While I love Iray and the fact that I can get really close to photo-real. If you explore a lot of the settings in Iray, you can get some really fantastic nonphoto-real effects. I've been having fun exploring Iray and everything that one can do with it. Add in postwork to that and you can get some great NPR images with it.
That, I do agree with. When I am doing photo-real, that lack of gravitational force really kills it for me. I've gotten close with posing and muscle morphs, but nowhere near as realistic as I'd like. I have a scene where I'm trying to pose a male gymnast on rings and it is NOT going well. It is really hard getting that sense of gravity and sense that the muscles are actually being used with digital characters. As for body fat and figures with skin that really should droop, yeah, not happening realistically at all. I am not a fit person and I can look in the mirror and then try to get that on a digital person and it is nowhere close to realistic. That extra weight that should sag a little more just doesn't in quite the right way. I guess the good news is that as I lose weight and get fitter, I'm getting closer to what the digital figure looks like. Ah, well.
Because the camera will never be as good (e.g. have the dynamic range) as the eye. Experienced photographers have learned this. Usually after much (years?) frustration.
I wouldn't. The high res photos of human skin are lit. "unlighting" them in order to be able to relight them with different lightfields and getting them to scatter and reflect realistically is insane difficult. So many textures are riddled with "baked in" shadows and scattering that totally blow any chance at realism. The "realistic" scenes are the ones where the scene lighting happens to match well with the "baked in" lighting in a figure.
I'm still new to DS, would love to learn that and so many tricks, tips and advanced uses! It took me forever just to figure out the UI LOL.) I have to do all my changes in Photoshop, which, admittedly I really like using. But it's kind of fun to create photoreal images too, then make them arty in Photoshop. It's twice the work I know, but I'm kind of addicted to Photoshop!
I've been using Iray since it came out and there is still tons of stuff I haven't learned yet. I use Filter Forge and GIMP for postwork, but I'm not that good with post yet. Baby steps. I'm getting better and using postwork more, but I still like to try and have as much done in the render engine as possible. I like to tinker, though, and I tend to play with surface settings, lighting, camera settings and tone mapping just to see what happens. Not everything is great, but I learn a lot. Sometimes, very cool things happen.
I'm talking when a good skin texture author has been at work - not someone like me where it simply looks like they have taken the smudge tool to everything. LMAO.
You can match the lighting with the photograph so your argument doesn't really hold water. And you've ignoring fog, glare, and blur filters they use to hide those shadowy mismatches when the lighting in the render doesn't match the lighting used to take the skin texture photos. Plus, finally, renders are typically done at a lesser resolution then the skin texture photos were taken at.
Now I have seen these skin texture sets where someone has tried to add more detail to the texture later than what it originally had to try and make it look more realistic and those are mostly awful and only usuable in like a phone size video game or something like that.
When everything is created correctly in a iRay rendered enviroment to me it looks like it is an 3D environment without the 3D glasses almost - it won't look like a photograph because too many environmental effects are missing that the camera misses, even with blurring and blooming and fog and so on.
Anyway, it turns at the best camera I had was actually a 1999 model Kodak Digital Camera. It made some of the prettiest arty photos and ditthered beatifully to make up for it's lack of resolution to create downright arty looking prints. That camera is long gone. I didn't realize it was the best camera I had, although the old style film camera my Nikon N60 (or N90) was really good too. I'm not a camera buff or anything, those are just my experiences with them.
And for those taking real photos with real cameras the easy way of avoiding sun glare washing out your photos is a polar filter on the lens. Must postprocessing photo SW has polar filters too.
@nelsonsmith
Here's a closeup of the Project EyeRay eyes. Model is Willow for G3F by Mihrelle. Default skin. UHT2 on Hair. Khory's Scintillant Lights. Note that the reflections are actual lights in the scene (not baked in).
Full resolution, feel free to "click in".
HDR goes a long way too. By taking three pictures (over-lit, under-lit and normal) one gathers all the needed information of all the parts of the scene. Combining them will get all of your parts lit properly, instead of having too chose between either too dark shadows or too bright light.
Come to think of it - maybe I should try that in 3D too. Having the same camera without shaking, it should give even better alignment results than my usual "shot from hand" shots.
I absolutely agree that a camera isn't the answer to every need for realism. Certainly not mine, anyway. I've sold book covers that feature things like burning or exploding buildings, and half-sunk powerboats that needed to look lifelike. Sure, it's easy to take a picture of someone's building or powerboat, but I imagine trying to capture the image in a render would be a lot quicker than finding someone willing to let me blow up or sink one of theirs. Although the appearance on CrimewatchUK if I didn't seek permission would probably do a lot to raise my profile :)
My take on this: IF you can choose use the tool most suited for the project. In the long run it may be possible to combine photography and 3d objects in a way that noone can tell what exactly in the image is real and what is CG created.
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@ Photogrammetry
I just stumbled upon this today and actually had to google it:
"Photogrammetry is the science of making measurements from photographs, especially for recovering the exact positions of surface points."
source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photogrammetry
Rikk just posted some images of models he worked on for Capcom for Resident Evil 7 that were created with photogrammetry.
"All the models were 3D-scanned and processed with Agisoft Photoscan. Cleaned, retopologized and detailed in zBrush. The hair were created with Ornatrix for 3DSMax. Rendered in Octane Render."
Source:
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=56140
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-> Photography and 3D can be combined in many interesting ways to create an image.
Of course with just "scanning" a human the work is not done. Now it needs to be rigged. And creating a morph for an existing figure line based on scan might not be that simple. But maybe one day there will be some solutions to make such workflows accesible for everyone...
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[stupid comment deleted]
I agree in the sense of photorealism just for the sake of photorealism itself ("see how real I can make a face look"). That's just a demonstration of how far 3D technology or your skills in utilizing it has come. Of course you can turn that into an art form itself ("state of the art" technology if you will) but that's a different ball game IMO.
But otherwise I agree with divamakeup about the possibility with 3D for relatively easily producing illustrations of things or scenes that you want to look realistic and which are difficult/impossible or too expensive to produce otherwise, where the main point is the content of the illustration and not just that it's photorealistic.
...I've been at this for years and am still terrible at postwork as I do not have a steady hand anymore to paint extra details in. About alI do is add filters for different effects, adjust tone mapping, and add text overlays.
Many have made very good points pertaining to 3D realism. I can understand why? movie companies, game developers, engineers, advertisers, etc...... would rely on 3D realistic CGI. Such as movie, Titanic, Star wars, etc..... Computers have changed the way, our world view technology, including art. For these type companies, CGI is cost effective. Every human being has freedom of choice, regardless of what I or anyone thinks. Many on the forum do not believe in postwork, some prefer biased over unbiased engines, some prefer Gen 1 over Gen 2 or 3, vice versa, it's all preferance.
Here I'll give example, of what I tried to share. Let's take music, a person spends years training to create/perform masterpieces on a piano. To me when a person performs on a piano, the audience is capturing the true essence of that person's talent. Now on the other hand, a person with no musical experience jumps on a computer, using music software, twiddles with different piano keys, adjusting various settings, etc.... can make music, but cannot capture the true essence of a piano player. The art in music.
So, what I'm stating is 3D realism can simulate realism, but never can capture true essence of realism. A camera captures an instant of realism in time.
So what I've basically learned from this thread is, an electonic drum machine is the same as a human drummer. And 3D software is same as a camera.
I honestly can see at the rate technolgy is advancing maybe in 15 years a person will be able to dictate a play script to an ultra fancy DAZ Studio type program and create a movie automatically from the dictation of the play script.
Where that will leave real actors and playrights and such in that time I don't know. They've been overly realiant on violence and special effects for a long time now and the actors are already mostly incidental to the violence and special effects.
However, as movie and TV watching and music listening are often a way for people to seperate themselves into cliques maybe such technology won't change the movie/TV creating dynamic much. Popular music by big labels in my opinion has gotten worse since technology has enabled most of it to be able to be created by re-mixing and arranging pre-existing computerized music clips without much orginal traditional inspiration and so if technology does the same for movies and TV shows, oh well.
SERIOUSLY doubtful. At best, it would sound like a monotone school play, voice wise, and the amount ofcomputing power needed to interpret vocal directions would be nearly unimaginable.
Effectively, it would take a level of AI that would almost require quantum computing, and an amount of coding that it would boggle the mind. 15 years? Impossible. 150? Maybe.
As for where that would leave actors and playwrights... remember, people thought movies would kill theater, and they didn't. People thought pre-recorded music would kill live performances, and it didn't. People thought the VCR would kill television, and it didn't. There will always be a need for actors and playwrights and the like, as long as people want to see performances.
There may be a want, but it isn't guaranteed that it will always be a necessicity. Modern movies today have shown that you can have highly successful films with no characterization to speak of; they are essentially action set piece followed by action set piece, with no thought whatsoever being put into story. The actors are almost superfluous.
Many have mentioned key aspects.
For me: lighting, pose (and expression), how the hair looks, and how it rests on the figure, and the same for clothes; if those are wrong, real textures don't help, neither does many of the other aspects.
As a matter of fact people were saying the same things 15 years ago about music and the commercial music scene has been obliterated. Movies & entertainment? Well look at YouTube and the revival of community theatre in even small college towns already. That hasn't happened because people are satisfied with the current new offerings from the big media players. Youtube and similar outlets, after a lot of LonelyGirl16 & Emo problems, has more and more people watching unique entertainment made by 'whoever' vs Hollywood and Mass Media all the time. Sure you can search the net and find speakers that will tell you Hollywood and the big media players are doing better than ever but that's not true. Percentage wise they took and continue to take on more and more losses of audience as a percent of the total population.
Only problem is it's very difficult to get people to pay for stuff that doesn't come from established media. Set ups like patreon have helped considerably and I try to support artist I follow, but record labels and Hollywood studios can make quite a bit off of bad films and music, while many of these truly independent artists have to struggle. Let's not even get into independent comic artists vs the big two.
...people still read books....well....I and a number of close freinds I know do.