>> Yes, in the whole seeing-is-believing/believing-is-seeing dance we do with 
>> this medium, Thomas' street creds in the geology area count for a LOT. 
>> (Your's too in the lighting arena btw ;) )

Thomas de Groot wrote:
> To tell the truth, I think that Ive's expertise in lighting and image 
> control is more fundamental in our mutual business than my knowledge of 
> geology :-)
> That said, while I try to use geology to a certain extent, it also often 
> gets in the way of pure creation, so it is finding the right balance. 
> Certainly, the *teeth* are pure WM artifacts (which I have not been able to 
> eradicate completely) but under some conditions you can find them in nature 
> too, as particular erosional features. I like to imagine that this landscape 
> shows steeply inclined, almost vertical, rock layers running over the ridge.
> 

Thanks for the flowers ;) but to me it seems by being a *hobbyist* and 
not a "pro" in the business (who is always restricted by deadlines and 
so has to work in a much more economical way) that almost everything is 
equally fundamental. So I am quite interested in e.g. Thomas' 
explanation how rock layers would run.

Like Thomas (and I believe this is also true for you, Jim) I'm not 
aiming for photorealism. But I think trying to achieve it is a quite 
interesting, entertaining and educational experience. It forces us to 
look very carefully at the "real stuff" to see how things look and - 
especially for the use within a renderer like POV-Ray - we have also to 
try to understand *why* things look the way they do.

My final goal (that I will never reach, but at least trying to get there 
is the main part of the fun) would be to have complete freedom of choice 
how photo-real, hyper-real, un-real, whatever-real an image of mine 
should look like.

I have mentioned the Chinese movie director Wong Kar-Way already a few 
times. What I do find so interesting about his movies (besides that I 
simply love them) is that they are just shot at real locations and he 
just works with the given real lighting conditions but achieves often an 
effect that especially those extremely beautiful Chinese actresses (and 
actors btw) appear sometimes almost ghostly and over worldly.
For sure locations, camera positions and so on are very carefully chosen 
but it is a completely different way as the common hollywood-shot where 
a lot of afford goes into artificial lighting setup and post processing 
to make things *look* real.
It would be quite interesting to extract some Wong Kar-Way movie stills 
from blue-ray discs (not available yet) and post them into some 
CG-forums (or here ;)) - by claiming they are CG. I'm pretty sure that a 
lot of people would criticize that it is too obvious CG, that the face 
looks too perfect and symmetric or even locate it deep in the "uncanny 
valley".

So much from me on that seeing-is-believing/believing-is-seeing 
dance/balance for now.

-Ive

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