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What you say may be true, but there's a difference between 16-bit photorealism and the photorealism possible today, and the difference is that it's possible to

What you say may be true, but there's a difference between 16-bit photorealism and the photorealism possible today, and the difference is that it's possible to find rendered images that are hard to distinguish from real life today. In the 16-bit era? Not so much. To give some examples, take a look at these images created in Blender: http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/24-photorealistic-blender-renders/ http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/24-photorealistic-blende...

jheriko 11y ago
its important to remember that path tracing for photorealism is considerably more expensive than raytracing. its like raytracing every pixel hundreds, thousands or even more times, and doing some extra work on-top.
eric_h 11y ago
Thanks for that link - there are some absolutely fantastic images in there.
potatolicious 11y ago
Most of those are pretty evidently distinguishable from real life... The issue here - and the point being made - is that we are already at the stage where many CG images can fool even close observers, and we've been here for some time. We've been passing around these "CGI OR REAL?!!!!" images for a few years at least, and when they are first created people really can't tell the difference, but yet somehow when people get used to the tech and revisit these images a few years down the line they look obviously synthesized. Ditto older movies like Jurassic Park, whose cutting edge CGI of the time were convincing even when viewing frame-by-frame, but to savvy eyes appears downright obvious today. So clearly "photoreal" is something we haven't reached yet. IMO the indicator that we've reached "true photoreal" is when an image rendered 5 years ago still holds up to fresh eyes.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  One of those images was created in 2007, and still holds up as photorealistic for me (though admittedly I'm not viewing it on a large monitor). I'd be interested to hear your take on the 'giveaways' on each of those images. I can see some on some of them, but not on all of them.

jheriko 11y ago

its important to remember that path tracing for photorealism is considerably more expensive than raytracing. its like raytracing every pixel hundreds, thousands or even more times, and doing some extra work on-top.

eric_h 11y ago

Thanks for that link - there are some absolutely fantastic images in there.

potatolicious 11y ago

Most of those are pretty evidently distinguishable from real life... The issue here - and the point being made - is that we are already at the stage where many CG images can fool even close observers, and we've been here for some time. We've been passing around these "CGI OR REAL?!!!!" images for a few years at least, and when they are first created people really can't tell the difference, but yet somehow when people get used to the tech and revisit these images a few years down the line they look obviously synthesized. Ditto older movies like Jurassic Park, whose cutting edge CGI of the time were convincing even when viewing frame-by-frame, but to savvy eyes appears downright obvious today. So clearly "photoreal" is something we haven't reached yet. IMO the indicator that we've reached "true photoreal" is when an image rendered 5 years ago still holds up to fresh eyes.

ZenoArrow 11y ago
One of those images was created in 2007, and still holds up as photorealistic for me (though admittedly I'm not viewing it on a large monitor). I'd be interested to hear your take on the 'giveaways' on each of those images. I can see some on some of them, but not on all of them.