An interesting and educational challenge, because it may show how large is
the gap between photographic reality and what we call "photorealism" in
3D... I've sometimes used photographs as guidelines and always found the gap
pretty wide (unless the real life model is itself very artificial, but then
what's the point : you may as well take a picture of a blank sheet of paper,
overexpose it and then run pov with only a white background - I guarantee a
100% match). AFAIK, the lighting model in povray is quite simple (Pixar's
Larry Gritz called it "simplistic" once) and one can achieve more or less
realistic effects only by trickery, as you mention. And even then...
Just for the fun, here is an example of what the big boys can do with
specialized software (Lightscape in this case, which does architectural
rendering where photorealism is necessary), and yet the author admits having
done some post-processing in Photoshop.
http://www.lightscape.com/Contest98/body_lealcomparison.asp
http://www.lightscape.com/Contest98/body_lealcomparison2.asp

G.

Fabian Brau wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Someone has already test how Povray can reproduce reality. This means
> you take a simple scene (simple object), with simple light and you take
> a photo and you compare to what povray calculate. Has povray is not
> devoted to do this you can in a second step use some tricks (additional
> light with no_shadow etc..). The difficulty is to repoduce exactly the
> real scene into povray and find the good texture. Someone has attempt to
> do this?
>
> Fabian.

Post a reply to this message