Thursday 28 March 2013

Hyper-Realistic CGI replacing product photography


Half of the above image is a photograph. The other half is digitally rendered. Can you tell which is which?

Wired has published an excellent article about how computer-generated images are moving out of movies and onto store shelves and catalogue pages.

Excerpts follow:

"You’ve probably seen KeyShot’s output, although you may not have realised it. That ultra-perfect computer image, with dead-on lighting that highlights all its critical features? The sweatsuit with the fabric that clings together where the seams stretch? The uber-clean Jeep deep in the hills on a gravely trail? All done in KeyShot, a program that enhances CAD creations to the point that they become indistinguishable from the real thing."

“The entire Microsoft Surface marketing campaign was done in KeyShot, and if you go out and buy any Microsoft product, the picture on the box is made with KeyShot,” says Henrik Wann Jensen, an Academy Award-winning computer graphics professor who founded KeyShot’s parent company, Luxion. ”The same goes for pretty much every smartphone, tablet, even the Nook was made in KeyShot.”

"After conquering the world of product rendering, Jensen is leveraging advances in Moore’s law to tackle some of the most intractable challenges in computer graphics. First up is utilizing his technology, capable of rendering the face of a watch, to do the same for the human face — a technological challenge that Jensen attributes to the complexity of subcutaneous hair and blood."
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