Attached Link: "The World's Most Photorealistic Vector Art"

This image is not a photo - it is vector art, with gradients.

To paraphrase my favorite line from Napoleon Dynamite:

*You know, like nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, Adobe Illustrator skills... Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.

That's just insane, incredible, but insane.  But I guess the same obsessive 'skill' goes into photorealistic painting and 3D rendering.

Wow - I'll stick to Poser can't afford Adobe products ;(

I don't know. I blew up the image and there is a texture to the skin.  It's not all gradients. The outline mode doesn't match all the color changes.

Corel's longtime Hedy Lamar box art was clearly vector art, but incredibly well done. Some of these may be a mix of Illustrator and Photoshop, but the most realistic don't appear to be standalone vector art. Without seeing an example showing the intermediate steps, I'm going to remain skeptical. Vector art, at its best, looks like airbrushed work. I haven't used a vector art program in a while, but getting photographic quality to the extent of this image isn't possible with its blurred distant hairs and bumped skin textures.

You can find a tutorial from one of the vector artists here:

http://www.creativebush.com/gmeshtutorial/

I only see this painstaking procedure good for blowing up pictures.
I'm sure the Entertainment Mags would like this feature so they can put someone's face of a photo taken far away, blown up perfectly on the front page.  (Jolie cheating on Brad!)

This really has nothing to do with 3D.

~Shawn

Quote - I don't know. I blew up the image and there is a texture to the skin.  It's not all gradients. The outline mode doesn't match all the color changes.

The image bagginsbill provided at the top of this forum is a bitmap image, simply because the format used by Renderosity to store images (jpeg) is a bitmap format - you can't show a vector image here. The original image, of which that is a copy, was created purely in Illustrator, however.

jonthecelt

it's an amazingly good image compared to the stuff in the gallery here. if they can automate this to the point where it takes less than a year to do a 90-minute movie, I think it will be a success.

OMG!!

That is absolutely amazing!!!!

it is a bit of a strange occupation though - most of the images starting points must be high res photos

would you feel good after 4 days work to have a photorealistic looking cabbage? or would you be one?

Salvador Dalí was mainly a Surrealist painter (part of the Dada movement of Europe in the early to mid 20th century).  But in his later years, he reached an amazing level of photorealism in some of his paintings.  The thing is that he never really went 'photorealistic' and stuck to surrealistic themes (there is one painting that could be considered more photorealistic than surrealistic).

Later, during the 1960's iirc, there was a movement for photorealistic painting.  For the most part, I don't get it.  If you can take a photograph, why paint it?  The only reason might be the challenge as there assuredly is no other explanation.  Yet, they are still among us - mainly airbrush artists or those who work with Photoshop producing photorealistic images.

I guess it all depends on your point of view.  Before photography, especially color photography, the drive for realism in art had merit.  This is because there was no other visual way to record real observations except through artistic representations.  With the invention of photography, this was no longer practically necessary.  If an artist of the early Renaissance had a camera (and there are speculations to the camera obscura but this was a very primitive light capturing device), why paint a magnificent battle scene that took months or years when you could capture the real scene by other means?

On the other hand, it could be an excellent fantasical, historical, or futuristic visualization tool to be able to create photorealistic images of things that cannot be capture by camera.  Let's face it, time marches on and a missed moment cannot be recaptured (time machines are basically wishful thinking used as devices for science fiction).  So, being able to present a 'photorealistic' image or movie of an event such as this would lend credibility or a sense of connection.

My problem with the effort involved here is that this shows amazing skill for a challenging process, but does not replace anything.  Such an image could have been much more easily produced by a camera.  And the implications here are both positive and negative.  Great work and talent show dedication and masterful skill using a tool or a group of tools.  But these processes could also be used to create convincing falsehoods (forgeries, doctored images, and so on).  Some of the best painting forgers are considered masters, criminals, but masters since the skill required to mimic, say, DaVinci or Rafael, is something that cannot be faked easily - it requires just as much skill and knowledge as was used by the original master.

I guess that some people consider 'art' to be the adeptness of their skills more than the emotional/philosophical/political/reasonable reasons for the process.  In other words, it is not the feeling, aesthetic, or thought-provocation that counts, but the technical execution.  This has always been with us, one supposes.  Sometimes one achieves greatness more by skill than by mastery towards an end, if you know what I mean.

Robert