I agree. When people try to make photorealistic images in raytracing, what
they're really trying to do is make it look like a professional photograph. A
professional photograph would have just the right angle or lighting ir whatever
to bring out the best part of an object. I noticed a rather interesting
phenomenon today; I was at just the right angle with the sun and clouds that
they got extremely bright around the outside edge and very quickly transitioned
to gray in the middle. If someone rendered that in POV, it'd only be a variant
of three colors, the sky and the two cloud colors, and people would say "get
rid of that color-banding". It would also look fake because we expect the
clouds to be dark on the bottom and light on the top and not give off waht
appears to be their own light (even though it's reflected). I think the great
thing about raytracing is you can "perfect" your images to make them more
aesthetically pleasing, and you can add objects that don't exist in real life.
My favorite raytraced images are the surrealistic ones.
Another example: the way the refrigerator light caught the orange drink it
looked like it was glowing radioactively.

David
visit my homepage! http://thunder.prohosting.com/~davidf
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Simen Kvaal wrote:

> I was just thinking of this topic when I read the above "PovRay and
> reality"-thread. My angle is somewhat different.
>
> I see a general problem when people (in general) comment raytraced/CG
> imagery (for example renderings with PovRay.) Often you can see such
> comments as "the water looks too plastic" and "maybe add more randomness to
> [whatever]." "The shadows are too sharp" and so on. My point is that whay
> cannot real-life look like that? Go out in your evironment (no, ouside the
> computer) and take look at something. It's quite easy to find an objects
> that "don't look realistic" and if someone had rendered something looking
> like a photo taken of it, you would say: "you should make the surface less
> reflective" or "it's too perfect" or similar. That is, it is easy to forget
> that nature *itself* can look ... well unnatural.
>
> This post is not a *personal* attack on all the people who comment posings
> (including myself.) but merely an attempt to open out minds and not be
> perfectionists. Have in mind that 'realistic'-looking scenes don't exist
> either.
>
> Anyone wants to comment?
>
> Simen.

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