s it real or rendered? Beans Magic 3D renderings
Via TimPritloves Weblog comes the a question if we are up to the task of creating real looking Human Characters out of 3d programs.
With the advent of Radiosity (reflection of light of non mirroring surfaces - for example put a red wooden ball on a white piece of paper and the white piece of paper will shine red around the ball) there was a huge jump of perceived reality in 3D animations. Todays all major 3D rendering application have an option to render in Radiosity mode so with a huge render time penalty that makes this almost not feasible for movie production yet. For stills nonetheless this rendering mode together with HDR(i) (high definition range imaging and lightning) has enabled some great 3D artist to make outstanding picture that come very close to reality. Tim who is not a graphic expert is already asking the question if one of the pictures on BeansMagic Website is real or not. As a close look has revealed it is of course not real. There are still problems with the Radiosity beeing to strong also there are still not 100% perfect shaders for skin that makes the skin look to flat (translucency in our skin is not a solved mystery yet). Also the material of her headphones is just to perfect. There should be subconscious scratches or imperfects (slight bumps) to make it look more real. Overall so this is a ultra lovely picture pointing in the right direction and with the new renderers on the market (brazil) we will see more and more of pics in this quality. Now they have to develop some better animation technics to also make the facial movements with its 1000 muscles more real as moving all this with hand is a pain and has failed in about every movie that I have seen that utilizes 3d characters that wanted to mimic real persons.
