“What is photorealistic? Learn the meaning of photorealistic visuals, real-world examples, and why photorealism is essential in 3D rendering.”
Ever been scrolling through images and it looks like there is a photograph but then it is a computer-generated image? That is called photorealism and getting to that stage. Where pixels look like reality is very challenging both technically and artistically.
The Goals of Photorealism
The idea of photorealism is simple enough which is to make a computer-generated image look so much like a photograph. That it is difficult to tell the difference. The challenge is that there is a huge difference between drawing a stick figure and to providing a portrait that looks believable to a viewer.
The goal is to completely fool the viewers eye. Capturing the light in the correct way a camera takes it, behaving the materials as they actually do in reality, and achieving every existing detail in the real world. No shortcuts, no close enough, the detail has to be perfect.
The Complexity of the Task
Creating photorealism in 3D renders requires a lot of interconnected pieces to be nailed perfectly. If one of them is missed, that one missing piece throws the rest of the project off.
Light plays an important role in most photorealistic renders. Light bounces around the scene in incredibly complex ways. A red ball in a white room isn’t just a red ball. It’s red, but the light bouncing around the room also influences the appearance of the ball. Light bounces differently off of the walls, floors, and other nearby objects, and shadows aren’t just solid black. They also have light from the surrounding environment.
All of this needs to be simulated in a realistic way. Which requires a ton of computational resources and a well prepared scene. There are a lot of factors that need to be calculated. These factors happen in milliseconds in our reality, but calculating them on a computer could take hours.
What is Photorealistic
The materials in the scene are just as important as the lighting. A rusty bolt looks very different from a clean, polished one. A worn leather chair looks different from a chair that is brand new. The way light reflects off the surface. The small imperfections, and whether the material is glossy or matte can all impact. Whether a viewer thinks the scene is real or not. Getting materials wrong can quickly break a scene’s photorealistic appearance.
Geometry and detail matter more than people realize. Perfect lighting and materials won’t feel right if a model is missing small details. Real objects show wear, fingerprints, and dust, and just creating details or presenting them convincingly shows a lot of time and skill.
Color accuracy is not talked about enough and is very important. Cameras and people see color differently. Getting the palette to feel photograph accurate is not a simple task and requires understanding color spaces, sensor, and white balance.
The Technical Reality
The technical side of photorealism involves using a rendering engine. That approximates real world physics. V-Ray, Corona, Arnold, and other popular rendering engines utilize path tracing and other techniques to span thousands of virtual light rays and compute the results of every surface in the scene.
This is very taxing to compute. High end hardware can require days or hours to render a single photorealistic frame. Because of this, many industries, like automotive, architecture, and product design, neglect to render in real time to achieve photorealistic results and render time in order to achieve the absolute best quality possible.
Up until recently, rendering engines have made rapid advancements recently. Engines like Unreal Engine 5 are able to create realistic results in response to user actions. While impressive, the results Engine 5 creates are the results of years of clever programming, leading to impressive, but undesirable results.
The Artistic Side
Capturing and reproducing a scene is a skill all in of itself, and one that requires more than the knowledge of facing a program and pressing a button. 3D rendering programs allow a user to create anything, but poor knowledge defaults a user’s results to garbage.
Knowing how to arrange a scene, and position objects and lights requires multiple tools in one’s belt craft a scene in a way that makes the viewers experience engaging and interesting. Providing the viewers a way to experience the scene is the creators way of interacting with those admiring the work. Each piece tells a different story, and the set of all the pieces lets the viewers feel like they are in a different world.
Where It Is Applied
Since its inception, photorealism has become a vital component in a number of different fields. It is used by architects to capture the attention of prospective buyers by creating representations of buildings that have not yet been constructed. Automobile designers render their vehicles in bold, striking tonal compositions to enhance the development of their designs. It is utilized by the designers of products for advertising. As audiences become more difficult to mislead, entertainment and visual effects are in a constant state of refining and improving photorealism.
The challenge is always the same; it is time and resource consuming. As such, it becomes extremely costly. Because of this reason, various fields are attempting to improve the speed of creating photorealistic images and to make their processes more manageable in the case of a rapid deadline.
The Uncanny Valley
Here is something odd: not always is the goal of developing photorealistic images to achieve photorealism, even when it technically can be accomplished. The Uncanny Valley is the phenomenon of an almost human-like automation that causes discomfort in people. A character that is 95 percent photorealistic can elicit. The same response that a character that is been rendered in a completely different style.
In cases where full photorealism can be achieved. The artist may intentionally hold back and choose to add some typographic integration and even render. The materials in a way that seems intentionally synthetic. This serves to remind the audience that achieving photorealism is a tool. It is not an end goal in itself.
Read Also: 3D Rendering of a Modern House: Transform Your Vision Into Reality
Future Perspectives
Fast advancement in photorealistic rendering tech continues to result in more refined tools that are easier to use and more widely distributed. The same goes for AI, though that’s a different story. Tasks that required expensive and intricate tech and specialized knowledge are now accessible to more artists and studios.
But accessible tools don’t make the production easier. The more refined the photorealism. The more time consuming and intricate the process becomes. Additional steps result in diminishing returns. And perception is a significant part of how rendering is evaluated. The more realistic, the more refined. The easier the flaws become to recognize and the more time consuming the process becomes to fix.
In summary, rendering photorealistic 3D imagery is a complex and detailed science. That relies on the illusion of convincing realism. To accomplish the goal, extensive time, collaboration of multiple cutting edge technologies, and creative ingenuity are required. When executed properly, results are adequately magical.