diogenese19348 posted at 12:19PM Sun, 15 November 2015 - #4238759

There's a good thread over at DAZ pointing out that Photorealism isn't really that important - if you want a picture of somebody there really isn't any scarcity of them of any type, pose, or costume. The point of 3D rendering is not to take photos, that's what camera's are for. At least for 99.99% of us, realistic is all we are looking for, not photo-realism. Which half the time someone removes with Photoshop editing anyway.

This is exactly what I am saying, if you change the word 'realistic' to the word 'believable'. For what it's worth, I think we are using the two words to mean the same thing, dio. Cameras made photo realism in portrait painting redundant, and if I want completely real documentation of what is, I'll still go with a camera, as will pretty much everyone else. I used CG when I want something that reality can't give me, and that includes Poser & DAZ Studio. They give me an idealized representation of reality, something prettier than what is, and that's very cool.

To reiterate, I love Poser and the DAZ figures. They let artists of all skill levels or with steep time constraints make some very cool stuff. I love working with them personally (in fact, I am planning a game using pre-rendered sprites made with the generation 6 stuff). I just think it's silly to pretend that they actually look like real people, when what they look like is more akin to classical Greek sculpture with believable skins. It's stylized a bit (minor anatomical detail removed as was pointed out when talking about Scarlett's face), idealized (nothing wrong with that), and just accurate enough to be believable, which is what they need to be for the customer base they are aimed at.