[Kolt]

I was wondering...

Why do 3d artists put a LOT of time into these 3d renderings, but they still don't look 'real'. What makes us see something as 'real'? I have to yell at every movie I see because it's VERY easy to tell the CG from reality. What is it?????

[Staff Sarge]

Because you won't notice it if there's a perfectly done CG in a movie.

[philjaeger]

i crack up every time i watch the simpsons, not because its real but because its an exaggeration of life. i see CG as the same, although some is done well enough so that we can't distinguish it from our surroundings. i personally love the sunrise sky scene in "The Grinch", the part of the movie that stays with me.

Technique wise, there are some great resources that explain how to create realistic CG images.

One more thing....CG might be the best way for an artist to express himself even if it isn't realistic. Certainly there are many unrealistic 2d paintings and drawings that hold much meaning.

One last thing....if you're talking about CG trying to be realistic in film, but not quite holding up....well i use suspended disbelief to take care of that.

Phil

[RRoam]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Staff Sarge:
Because you won't notice it if there's a perfectly done CG in a movie.

---

haha... good one!



------------------
http://www.robert.ronnholm.com

[Giant Hamster]

its because they are too hell bent on making things perfect, and adding nice textures and working with curved surfaces and shit that doesnt mattern...

to make something look real, you have to make it look like crap. cause crap = good.

you have to add dust, and fuzz, and perperation, not more joints and color, you have to add film grain, and make the color value bland and normal.

yeah....

------------------
-JameZ the Giant Hamster-

The Hamster Alliance
AIM: Gianthmstr
Multimedia Producer/designer/all of the above.,overall guru :)...and music music music! weee!!

[root88]

I bet you didn't know that there were TONS of CG effects in scenes from the movies Gladiator and Titanic.

[Muzman]

a lot of the time its because the 3d department resists losing their edges in the background (that and the colours being badly matched.) You'll notice a lot of little back lighting and lighting inside mouths and other places where there shouldn't be any. (that and the bad texturing and animation that's too smooth)
It's the modern day equivalent of being able to see the strings

[Visionary]

... or how about the matrix...
yeah obviously there was CG effects but I was shocked to find out after the movie that the ENTIRE rooftop scene and the subway was ALL CG. Take that baby and look at the subway frame by frame... its just amazing.

-Visionary

[balistic]

I guarantee that you've seen CG in a movie that you thought was real. From Mullins' matte work, to 3D set extensions and digital extras . . . its there, but its executed well enough that it doesn't read as an effect. I was blown away when I found out that the "102 Dalmations" teaser (the one with the falling puppies) didn't use any real dogs.

When your brain doesn't see anything wrong with an element, it has no reason to scrutinize or remember it.

Context makes a big difference too. My "Window" image fooled a mailing list full of professional photographers when it was presented as a photograph . . . now, it looks totally fake to me, and when its shown in a 3DCG context, people often find faults with its realism . . . but call it a photograph from the outset and people become much more accepting of its authenticity.

One guy even scored the piece with a B+, and told me to "keep shooting."

Perception of reality is all about integration and context.

------------------
"What we're hearing, techno, is the process of trying to create something of the future." - J.M.

Brian "balistic" Prince
3D Artist
Eggington Productions
www.bprince.com

[jzero]

One thing about that Matrix rooftop: it was all CG, but NOT in the usual way. It was done with a technique which uses photographs to create immersive 3D environments (Paul Debevec being The Man on this subject - see below). The Matrix shot was made by using photos of the cityscape to create an all-around shot that Mr. Reeves could be pasted into as he 'rotated' under those bullets. You can do that rotating-camera trick with a central subject, but doing the background is another chore, apparently.

My point being, that Matrix shot looked so real because most of the images you saw WERE real, just filtered through CG techniques.

Then again, there's Final Fantasy...

Check Debevec's page for the info:
http://graphics3.isi.edu/~debevec/

/jzero

[This message has been edited by jzero (edited March 21, 2001).]

[balistic]

Just for the sake of being nitpicky, the technique of projecting photos onto geometry from different angles is actually IBR, Image-Based Rendering, and not HDRI. HDRI (High Dynamic Range Imaging) refers to the breadth of values in a photograph or rendering . . . A 24-bit image only gives you 256 levels of intensity between white and black, but an HDRI image combines several levels of exposure into one file. The increased tonal range of HDRI allows you to achieve more realistic highlight bloom, or depth-of-field effects.

Probably the best way to visualize what HDRI does, is to think of a photograph of a white car with the afternoon sun visible in the frame. In a regular 24-bit image file, parts of the car will likely be pegged at 255,255,255, as will the sun . . . but that's hardly realistic, because in the real world, the sun is many times brighter than something like a car. A computer monitor can't possibly display the sun's true intensity, so it clips it down to the limits of an RGB image file. HDRI gets around this limitation by combining several images shot at different exposure settings into one file. You can't see any difference on your screen, but when you give that HDR file to a renderer, the computer now knows that the sun is really five hundred times brighter than the car, and will calculate lighting, bloom, and focal blur accordingly.

Anytime you are mapping or lighting geometry with an image or images, that's IBR. The source photos don't neccessarily need to be of the HDR variety (though high range images definitely help when you're doing image-based lighting).

Here is an IBR test I did a while back at work:



The scene is receiving all of its illumination from a non-HDR photograph of the sky. This technique is valuable for matching the lighting of CG props and characters to photographed environments.

Apologies if none of this makes sense . . . feel free to hit me with questions . . . CG lighting is kind of my bag.



------------------
"What we're hearing, techno, is the process of trying to create something of the future." - J.M.

Brian "balistic" Prince
3D Artist
Eggington Productions
www.bprince.com

[Bradford]

Final Fantasy the Movie is starting to break that barrier. Give it a few more years, and CG will make it hard to distiguish what is real and what is not.

------------------
[email protected]
icq:3704871

[Dthind]

quote:

---

Originally posted by balistic:
((All of your post))

---

WOW, Duh, Do I look stupid... WOW, thanks for the information... *...crawls back under rock and looks for grubs...*

"Impressive"



------------------
Ich habe keine Idee, was ich mich befasse

[shardik]

im impressed by it all... made me want to change my future plans... balistic what do you do?

------------------
-matt

[balistic]

Shardik: You mean professionally? I work at a small animation studio as the main lighting/texture guy. We've done some broadcast work and movie preproduction, but we're mostly a game art house lately. I haven't really worked on any major projects yet . . . at least none that I can talk about yet :/

I'd love to do lighting direction for an all CG film at some point.

Outside of work, I'm very interested in CG as fine art . . . for the past couple years I've been trying to nail photorealism . . . not because I view it as any kind of pinnacle of style, but because you can fool people with it. I want to get prints of my work into galleries, and just have people accept it as photography . . . I'd like people to see a rendering of a place that only exists in my head, and because its rendered like a photograph, believe that its a real place. I guess I want a little slice of omnipotence

If you want to get into 3D, I'd recommend picking up one of the more inexpensive tools, like Hash A:M (the one I use, $300), Cinema 4D, or Lightwave. Get a feel for it in your spare time. Take fine art classes and apply those principles to your 3D stuff.

Find out what aspect of 3D you enjoy the most . . . lighting, textures, modeling, animation, et cetera . . . and get amazing at that. Don't /totally/ commit to being a one-trick-pony, but it helps to have a specialty.

Whatever you do, don't spend money having someone teach you a software package when you could be receiving art training. By the time you finish a course in AztecUltraXLXS 3.5, they'll come out with IncaMAX SuperDX 4.0. Composition and color theory don't receive nearly as many revisions as 3D software.

------------------
"What we're hearing, techno, is the process of trying to create something of the future." - J.M.

Brian "balistic" Prince
3D Artist
Eggington Productions
www.bprince.com

[This message has been edited by balistic (edited March 22, 2001).]

[travis travis]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Kolt:
I was wondering...

Why do 3d artists put a LOT of time into these 3d renderings, but they still don't look 'real'. What makes us see something as 'real'? I have to yell at every movie I see because it's VERY easy to tell the CG from reality. What is it?????

---

Money is an issue. Technical skill is an issue. Willingness to technically innovate is an issue. Creativity is an issue. Their artistic talent is an issue.

Movies usually aren't so bad with CG because they have the budgets to employ people who can actually do good stuff. If you want to see some bad/cheap CG try television shows like Xena and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's really a shame some of the cheapass desktop effects that get used sometimes. If you saw the episode of Buffy, a huge season ender, where the mayor turned into just a stupid, low quality CG giant serpent then you'll know what I mean. It was just terrible! But if you don't have millions and millions of dollars to spend on the right people and right equipment then you're out of luck. And don't blame the people who create bad CG, it's not always their fault, they may just be a victim of circumstance with what time, technology, and resources they have to work with... but it's still terrible. They should have the sense to try something else if they can't get really high quality CG because low quality can wreck the viewing experience

[Totally]

I think one of the big ol' problems with cg being used in movies is that the effects are many times overdone, overflashy. The problem is that these effects should be used more subtley.

There are many cases where cg is very well placed and very well done. The way you can spot good cg in movies is this: not even being able to notice its there.

------------------
---
Dave Myers http://members.home.com/totally