Quote - > Quote - > Quote - Most users wouldn't know realism if it it put on a latex glove and probed their tender orificies, as the Realism gallery tends to show.  Perhaps it isn't very nice of one to point this out, but the basic fact isn't all that nice either.

Most users also haven't spent as much time as BB has trying to understand how everything works, much less make it real.  I still don't think he's come up with a human shader/light combo that he's happy with yet.

You must have seen other works then shown here then..... I haven't seen a realistic render that's any better then other peoples images from him in his rendo gallery at all, at love to see his real work......

You are confusing me with some artist. I've said dozens of times, I'm not an artist, and have nothing to say with art. I am a musician and composer and I do strive to communicate things with music and to evoke an emotional response in my listener. But with CG? It's just an amusing way to engage my brain - something similar to sudoku. Nobody does sudoku to communicate anything, yet it gives them a sense of accomplishment - of having met a mental challenge and overcome it. To me, finding a slime shader or rust shader or snow shader in those nodes is a sudoku puzzle, nothing more. Finding a way to light a scene well using only one light is also an interesting challenge that I enjoy.

I also enjoy teaching people how to enjoy their hobby more, even if I do not share their motivation for the hobby.

As for the value of realism, I think that it's fine to draw like Vargas, with paint or with Poser, but it was an easier puzzle to make a Vargas shader than to make a realism shader. (I published the Vargas shader quite early in my Poser "career". I still don't have a satisfactory realism skin shader.)

Similarly, I can draw stick figures about as well as any child. And maybe if I had an interesting story to tell, I might choose to do that. But I doubt people would pay $1 billion dollars to see a 2 hour stick figure movie, no matter how good a story it is. Avatar, on the other hand... - well you see the point I hope.

Even when a movie is clearly presented in a stylized way for the purpose of creating mood, the importance of realism cannot be dismissed. In this sense, realism refers to shadows and highlights being present when they should be, not missing or presented in incosistent ways. Consider the movie Ratatouille. The Pixar artists wrote of their study of wet cloth - how they wanted to understand what wet cloth looks like, so that when they CG character comes out of the river, we understand him to be wet. The scene was intentionally not photorealistic, but realism was an enormous part of its construction. Go read about it - it's fascinating.

And even in a stylized context, if you can't tell that a stick is made of bamboo versus metal, then you do the viewer a disservice. What would Kung Fu Panda have been like if his pants did not look like burlap, if his fur was no different looking than plastic? Shaders matter, and they are supposed to look like real things, even if you do not exactly implement photo realism. They need to differ in ways that are consistent with how real things differ. Shiny things should be shinier than dull things. If you don't understand speculars, you tell an ugly, childish, disconcerting story, even in a pure animation that has nothing to do with photorealism.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)