"If you look at the very top image. The render, character looks very realistic. But when zoomed out, the realism quality is lost. Why do I have to change my lighting, shadows?"

Robo, when you look at that top image (the close-up head shot), do you really think it would fool someone into thinking it's a photo? Do you see where it falls short?

The same elements that are keeping the top image from looking like a photo is keeping the bottom one from doing the same.

The top image looks "realistic", but that's only due to the details in the textures, since nothing else about the scene is lending to it's believability. When you zoom out to the full body shot, now you're losing the up-close details of the textures, and since you don't have any other elements to maintain the believability, it looks totally unconvincing.

See what I mean? :-)

Realism is VERY hard to master. Even the real pros sometimes get it wrong. Human beings are the hardest of all, because our eyes see them every single day, and we know how they should look immediately. Plus, unlike some other things that are easy to fake in 3D, human skin is still one of the hardest challenges to duplicate. The way real skin reacts with light, the scattering that happens, etc., all these are impossible to get spot-on in an artificial environment. It would take dozens of quantum computers to calculate the way light reacts with skin, etc. So we do our best to "fake" the effect. Even physically calculated SSS in advanced renderers isn't nearly as accurate as the real thing. ;-) Message edited on: 08/24/2005 15:27

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