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GLBHyper-Reality in 3D: A Closer Look
0Article by Dave Cabrera
Plenty of 3D art is realistic, but we still understand at first glance that it's something somebody made. To call a piece of art "hyper-realistic" is a whole other idea. To be merely "realistic" is to evoke an image of reality in the viewer's head. To be considered "hyper-realistic", a piece of art needs to successfully fool the viewer into thinking it is an image of the real world.
3D art has been fooling fallible human eyes into mistaking it for reality for as long as it's existed. But as as the technology behind it and the techniques that artists use continue to advance, so too will we see even more hyper-real 3D art that baffles the eyes and boggles the mind.
Erica by Ian Sprigs : Created with Maya and Mudbox, rendered with V-Ray
Erica by Ian Sprigs
How do people do it? As you likely well know, simulating reality is much more complicated a job than just a few mouse clicks.
Better models
Needless to say, if you're trying to convince your viewers that your work could be an image of a real thing, you're going to need some very accurate models of your subjects. Particularly for complex subjects like human beings, nothing less than perfect anatomical accuracy, skin that looks like the real thing, and perfectly natural facial expressions are going to fool a human eye into thinking the work could be real.
Of course, here on RenderHub you can buy some photorealistic models of a variety of subjects, from human beings to furniture to entire neighborhoods.
Remember that every single aspect of the scene that you choose to include has to be able to pass as the real object. Choosing just a single element that's out of place, too perfectly in place, or doesn't look fully real; a prop cell phone, a fake-looking car on the street, a garbage can whose shape is too simple, will tip the viewer off subconsciously and ruin the illusion of reality. It's like when that one slightly "off" detail in a dream tells you that you're dreaming, and you pop awake with a start.
And of course, when you're dealing with human or other living beings, you need to give a lot of thought to their poses. People don't T-pose (except as a joke; kids love that T-pose) in real life, nor do they stand fully immobile in place with their hands at their sides. You need to seriously study the way people move, and even the way they stand in place, to come up with poses and expressions that pass the glance test.
Getting people right; getting them to look hyper-real instead of like eerie mannequins is truly complicated. After all, we're people. We innately know everything about us, and we can sniff out when something is weird, even if we aren't consciously aware of it.
Realistic lighting
Another element that's crucial to creating a credibly hyper-real 3D image is your lighting. Everything our eyes see is information that's reflected to us through light, and though we naturally take the presence of light for granted, we also have a sense of how it "should" look through years of experiencing it. Light and its behavior are, in other words, a major part of the "reality" that we perceive every day.
Tony by Ian Sprigs : Created with Maya and Mudbox, rendered with V-Ray
So it stands to reason that we want convincing lighting: both to beautify our models and to sell the reality of our image to the viewer. Of course, many 3D modeling programs allow us to work with realistic lighting that matches the kind of heavy lights used in real-world photography, film and TV. That extra polish will make you work look that much more real.
Another way to light your scene that's quick and surprisingly effective is by using HDRI lighting: mapped from an actual photo, modelers can use a single image to light a scene as though their 3D objects were actually in that space. That's pretty real!
Using camera options in your program to simulate a real-world camera's depth of field and varying focus will make your final render look like an actual photo, pushing reality to your viewer even more.
Conclusion
There are all kinds of ways to approach 3D art, but if we're talking about "hyper-real" we need to focus on mimicking the real world so directly that a casual viewer will assume the image is the real thing. We see this all the time on movies and TV; we don't even question the "reality" of the average CG special effect even though we know rationally that it isn't real. The effect is good enough that it sinks right into the scenery. That's the job of the hyper-real artist: to fool the viewer's eyes so convincingly that it doesn't even occur to them the image isn't real.
Thankfully, as we discussed, they have a lot of tools with which to achieve this goal; these that we've discussed and many more. Now all that's left is to do the work.
Self-Portrait by Ian Sprigs : Created with Maya and Mudbox, rendered with V-Ray
