Most photorealistic CGI spaceship

[Glazy]

Originally Posted by IRML

^yeah maybe a nasa cleaning lady, but you can tell it's not real

The trouble is if it did look 100% real then people who'd complain they'd used NASA footage ! So you can't really win !

[Tag_Astro]

I think if a car seems realistic, it's because a car is a real object. I mean, look a CGI planes in Flyboys, they are so realistic, but because our brain knows what a car looks like and so, it thinks that it's a real car. When you see a X Wing, a part of your brain knows that X Wings dont' exist...
It's the inverse for fake animals. Our brain knows by seeing a CGI animal or character that something is wrong... Except for dinosaurs, because we have never seen true dinosaurs in motion... And so, the dinos from Jurasik Park seem real, truly real...
Tag

[IRML]

Originally Posted by Glazy

The trouble is if it did look 100% real then people who'd complain they'd used NASA footage ! So you can't really win !

but when Digital Domain created a fake cow to be run over for "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and all the animal rights people complained they ran over a real cow for the film, the DD guys just showed them the scene file and it was all sorted

[IRML]

Originally Posted by Tag_Astro

I think if a car seems realistic, it's because a car is a real object. I mean, look a CGI planes in Flyboys, they are so realistic, but because our brain knows what a car looks like and so, it thinks that it's a real car. When you see a X Wing, a part of your brain knows that X Wings dont' exist...

a lot of people say that but I think it's a load of crap, an x-wing for example is made of materials like a car or an aircraft or anything else, it doesn't look 100% real in star wars because it's just a model with paint on it, but if that were done with todays CGI it could be made to look photorealistic with no problem

if you let your brain limit yourself like that you're just spoiling your cinema experience, when I saw Dead Man's Chest last year I knew Davy Jones wasn't real because it's a movie, but that didn't stop me enjoying some of the most photoreal effects I'd ever seen

[traq]

a big problem with "photorealism" is that people have an idea about what a photograph looks like. what resolution, parts in focus, how much film grain...

[Glazy]

It makes you wonder what it would look like if they took something like a full size X-Wing and hung it under a Hercules transport plane and filmed it and then painted out the wires, would people still say it didn't look real ?!

[juanxer]

Reading Cinefex articles about movies where real life (or real life-like) ships have to be depicted, be it via CGI or scale models, the artists involved often find themselves having to use tricks of the trade to impress "unappropiate" visual cues (aging washes, exagerated paneling, etc.) so that viewers get a correct feel for the scale of things, specially when these things are "new" (just out of the factory or nearly so). That goes for the Apollo spaceship and for things as mundane as the oceanliner Poseidon. Curiously, I remember the Mission to Mars ship hull being rather boring and feeling somewhat undetailed in the scenes when a member of the crew inspects her for micrometeorite impacts.



What the "Voyage to the planets" BBC series uses for giving this feeling of realism is: playing with wide angle, fisheye and telephoto lenses in ways no fiction works would often use nowadays; play with camera placements that most of times suggest they belong to hull-mounted or free-floating device-mounted cameras; very natural-looking lens flares, blooms and burns, with this white-bluish tinge we are used to see in NASA footage when it's light reflected from the very ship, plus scratch marks, ice? and other lens defects; sedate camera movements or very mechanical ones; and, of course, an excellently modeled and textured 3D spacecraft. I remember "Space Cowboys" using the same techniques.

I can't find hires pics of the ship: here there are some small ones resulted from googling her a bit (by the way, now I see where the heat dump panels are ).

BBC - Press Office - Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets spacecraft

Television at Framestore-CFC (at the top it has a link to a small movie showing the main titles including a ship passby)

[JustinDixon]

In the introduction to BBC's gem - Voyage to the Planets the spacecraft was so realistic I actually had to pause my dvd and look hard for signs of it being CGI - a few were found but not much. I swore I thought it was a miniature.

[meaty-btz]

as for the realism, is it camera realism or eye realism. Cameras see things soo much differently. Such as when nasa released some footage of the shuttle in space dropping the main tank.... crisp, bloomy, undetailed, few if any stars (washed out by sun and planet shine). Again people thought that the Saturn images were fakes because it was soo ... crisp. the shadow of the rings on the planet standing out so distinctly defys our personal concept of what space should look like. We like to put atmospheric effects on our CGI planets but you only see such effects when in close orbit, from even a lunar distance there really is no atmospheric edge visible.

I guess the better question would be one of realism vs ART. What we do is art, it is designed to please the eye of the viewer and work within certain known preconceptions. True realism would be dry, boring, uninspiring. Fictions inspire and impress. I'll take the art anyday... that being said the 3rd picture of the space craft is very life-like but with just enough art tossed in to not be blah.

[juanxer]

It's all very subjective, anyway, and it's too the product of eye education. For example, we tend to associate interlaced video material and video footage characteristics (no flicker, certain lens/CCD effects on imagery, etc.) with "reality" because of its use in newscasts and live TV: even conventionally videoproduced TV dramas have this certain theater-like feel. Film means drama, so the grain, flicker, somewhat impressionistic effect, etc. is the cue for our brains to get romantized. HD TV and video is introducing a new set of cues, perhaps, as even if HD movie titles have the same 24 FPS and other characteristics of film, they lack many of the usual movie theater projection artifacts, the projectors' double flash per frame thing, etc., thanks to modern mastering techniques, and introduce new ones (imaging tech: LCD, plasma, projector, etc. Image refresh method due to codec tech, etc.).

So what we find is artists playing with these conventions to "cross the line" and evoke certain feelings of something being "real", even if that reality is art-directed to death.


(I remember Douglas Trumbull saying he tried to apply Showscan to filming drama (Showscan is Super70 mm. film at 60 FPS, which EEG tests showed the brain confusing it with reality, a boon for cineride spectacle) and ultimately dropped it because of its utter failure to engage the audience: they felt the sets as such, people as actors instead of characters, etc.)

(Even if the imagery was as dull as a peeble, you can turn it into the most dramatic thing just by adding music. Just by adding a context, actually. I was watching BBC's "The planets" documentary, and there were some moments of human discovery consisting of some grainy low FPS probe imagery and a particulary subdued music soundtrack, and it was so powerful it choked me with emotion.)