My question is, what the features are that people respond to in in this image? There is always this debate as to whether attempts at "realistic" cg images should be photographic or not but for the time being I think that it makes sense for them to given there are no immersive media yet that I know of, all the images I see are photos, paintings, or drawings. I have never seen any image that approximates human vision even in cinema so it would make sense for cg images to simulate other media rather than natural vission.

What I call the "render-realism" of the no-post-work movement wherein every pore is sampled, textured and displaced reminds me of the hyper realism of Renaisance painting or 1970's representational minimalism and process painting which in art history class was described as a simulation of going over the entire scene with a magnifying glass from a scanning POV rather than replicating the distortion of focus of natural vision in a single point lensed POV.

Would some one isolate the factors in this image that lend it photographic credibility?

I come up with:

1. surface incident (degree of entropy on the textures)
2. the use of spotlight effect
3. the flattened contrast
4. the strong simulated chemical/pixel grain which seems more prounouced in the dark areas and less in the light areas as would occure with photographic media.

I did tests on the image removing certain factors which can not be posted here due to TOS but would any one volunteer to construct an original Poser scene and issolate and compound various factors demonstrated in this image to show what is going on here as they understand it?

Conceptually I have always wondered if the use of sampled textures is more compremising to the cg integrety of an image then aggresive post-work. People who disdain post-work seem to embrace hi-res photo textures as opposed to "hand painted" or procedural textures. I don't know what I think on that issue myself.