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It would absolutely be possible to produce prerendered videos of mostly static scenes using today's technology that would be indistinguishable from reality, alt

It would absolutely be possible to produce prerendered videos of mostly static scenes using today's technology that would be indistinguishable from reality, although the expense would be high. And yet, no one has. :) It'd be a fun trophy to claim. My theory is that it's not merely a matter of computing power. We have massive horsepower now, but our algorithms are still wrong at a fundamental level. We still approach it by trying to simulate the underlying physics of light: the transport algorithms, radiance sampling, and so on. But between the RGB textures that have nothing to do with nature and the physics approximations that we're forced to settle with, something ends up lost in translation. No matter what we try, that human observer ends up looking at a final product that looks nothing like a real camcorder video. Back during ~iPhone 4 days, someone forged some pictures of the "next gen iPhone." It was a hoax, but a lot of people were fooled at the time. Remarkably, it was a computer rendering. The reason it looked real is because he took a picture of the rendering using a real camera, which muddied up the colors to the point that you couldn't tell it was a rendering. The idea here would be similar: analyze the actual pixels coming out of a real camcorder and try to mimic the nuances as closely as possible. In the best case, it wouldn't be a physics simulation at all: the program might be able to guess how the scene should look based on partial data and past experience.

deleted 9y ago
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falsedan 9y ago
> And yet, no one has. :) Plenty of people have. How would you spot it in a movie or music video?
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Movies and music video mix in footage from real life. In fact, they're mostly footage of real life. It's interesting that it's so easy to fool us when they use that technique, but 100% simulated video is the tempting target. To put it differently, if the goal is to render a laptop, movies and TV shows cheat by filming an actual laptop and overlaying the footage. Whereas our goal is to synthesize a laptop.
  - falsedan 9y ago
    You don't put a limit on the length of the video: any movie or music video with 2 or more sequential frames of completely synthetic footage disproves your claim. Do you think composing real footage and generated together doesn't count? What about two generated sources? > they're mostly footage of real life. Historically, yes. Modern-day, most blockbusters heavily rely on generated video. You have made your point abundantly clear; I am trying to show you that your desired state has already happened and you probably didn't notice, and to get you to clarify what it is you're looking for, and why.
PeachPlum 9y ago
> And yet, no one has. :) I would be surprised if most people noticed the amount of CGI that goes into regular TV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjorAhcnbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjorAhcnbY Plenty of it is composites but parts of those are rendered
dahart 9y ago
> We still approach it by trying to simulate the underlying physics of light: the transport algorithms, radiance sampling, and so on. But between the RGB textures that have nothing to do with nature and the physics approximations that we're forced to settle with, something ends up lost in translation. You keep talking about rendering being the problem and yet you acknowledge that photos can be indistinguishable from reality and motion being the hard problem. Do you not see the disconnect in your own argument? Light simulation isn't the issue, motion simulation is. Movement and model and texture complexity all have a long way to go. The people practicing graphics in research and in production know what the problems are, they are aware of the approximations they are making, they know what they need to make graphics more realistic, and they are making conscious choices of where to spend their limited budgets. The big problems just aren't due to light transport or radiance sampling, your pet theory seems ignorant of what's going on in CG practice today. If you would just talk to (and listen to) some production people and researchers... You're still ignoring the fact that realism in CG in increasing. There's a clear trend, and we are closing the gap on the details that make CG look unrealistic. The standards are higher now than last year, which was higher than the year before. Realism has always increased every year, and yet at no time was the increase due to a fundamental change in multiplying colors together.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Light simulation isn't the issue, motion simulation is. Movement and model and texture complexity all have a long way to go. FWIW I completely agree, and this is a key observation. DaVinci devoted several chapters to the problem of motion in art, and it will always be with us. That said, You're still ignoring the fact that realism in CG in increasing. There's a clear trend, and we are closing the gap on the details that make CG look unrealistic. The standards are higher now than last year, which was higher than the year before. Realism has always increased every year, and yet at no time was the increase due to a fundamental change in multiplying colors together. This is the same argument that's always trotted out. Graphics are improving, but if you diff 2018 to 2013, it's nothing like 2013 to 2008. The fundamental leaps we've been accustomed to seeing are simply not happening anymore. The rate of progress is very clearly slowing down. It depends which axis you measure, of course. We're able to render more things each year, which is nice. But the visual quality from a fundamental perspective is more or less the same as it was a few years ago. The quality issues stem largely from light transport -- the colors are all wrong! If you compare them to a photo, you'll see that we don't end up remotely close. You can see this vividly in the YT link above (the Unreal engine walkthrough). If you try to picture yourself in the video, you'll get a strange feeling of being in a candy world, or a shrinkwrapped house. That's certainly a promising axis to explore, and there are hundreds of papers published each year solely about light simulation.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

falsedan 9y ago

> And yet, no one has. :) Plenty of people have. How would you spot it in a movie or music video?

sillysaurus3 9y ago
Movies and music video mix in footage from real life. In fact, they're mostly footage of real life. It's interesting that it's so easy to fool us when they use that technique, but 100% simulated video is the tempting target. To put it differently, if the goal is to render a laptop, movies and TV shows cheat by filming an actual laptop and overlaying the footage. Whereas our goal is to synthesize a laptop.
- falsedan 9y ago
  You don't put a limit on the length of the video: any movie or music video with 2 or more sequential frames of completely synthetic footage disproves your claim. Do you think composing real footage and generated together doesn't count? What about two generated sources? > they're mostly footage of real life. Historically, yes. Modern-day, most blockbusters heavily rely on generated video. You have made your point abundantly clear; I am trying to show you that your desired state has already happened and you probably didn't notice, and to get you to clarify what it is you're looking for, and why.

PeachPlum 9y ago

> And yet, no one has. :) I would be surprised if most people noticed the amount of CGI that goes into regular TV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjorAhcnbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjorAhcnbY Plenty of it is composites but parts of those are rendered

dahart 9y ago

> We still approach it by trying to simulate the underlying physics of light: the transport algorithms, radiance sampling, and so on. But between the RGB textures that have nothing to do with nature and the physics approximations that we're forced to settle with, something ends up lost in translation. You keep talking about rendering being the problem and yet you acknowledge that photos can be indistinguishable from reality and motion being the hard problem. Do you not see the disconnect in your own argument? Light simulation isn't the issue, motion simulation is. Movement and model and texture complexity all have a long way to go. The people practicing graphics in research and in production know what the problems are, they are aware of the approximations they are making, they know what they need to make graphics more realistic, and they are making conscious choices of where to spend their limited budgets. The big problems just aren't due to light transport or radiance sampling, your pet theory seems ignorant of what's going on in CG practice today. If you would just talk to (and listen to) some production people and researchers... You're still ignoring the fact that realism in CG in increasing. There's a clear trend, and we are closing the gap on the details that make CG look unrealistic. The standards are higher now than last year, which was higher than the year before. Realism has always increased every year, and yet at no time was the increase due to a fundamental change in multiplying colors together.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
Light simulation isn't the issue, motion simulation is. Movement and model and texture complexity all have a long way to go. FWIW I completely agree, and this is a key observation. DaVinci devoted several chapters to the problem of motion in art, and it will always be with us. That said, You're still ignoring the fact that realism in CG in increasing. There's a clear trend, and we are closing the gap on the details that make CG look unrealistic. The standards are higher now than last year, which was higher than the year before. Realism has always increased every year, and yet at no time was the increase due to a fundamental change in multiplying colors together. This is the same argument that's always trotted out. Graphics are improving, but if you diff 2018 to 2013, it's nothing like 2013 to 2008. The fundamental leaps we've been accustomed to seeing are simply not happening anymore. The rate of progress is very clearly slowing down. It depends which axis you measure, of course. We're able to render more things each year, which is nice. But the visual quality from a fundamental perspective is more or less the same as it was a few years ago. The quality issues stem largely from light transport -- the colors are all wrong! If you compare them to a photo, you'll see that we don't end up remotely close. You can see this vividly in the YT link above (the Unreal engine walkthrough). If you try to picture yourself in the video, you'll get a strange feeling of being in a candy world, or a shrinkwrapped house. That's certainly a promising axis to explore, and there are hundreds of papers published each year solely about light simulation.