Maybe I am in the wrong section. I apologise for that.
I am a PhD student and I am working with Blender for my thesis project. I would like to know what criteria are used to determine if a render is photorealistic or not.
I ask this because in my thesis project we want to create a scene with different levels of photorealism. What I mean by this is a scene that looks more or less like a picture.
I know that there are photorealistic rendering competitions. Do you know the criteria used to judge them?
I’m not sure if there can be a definitive ordered list of things that are more or less important in order to achieve photo realism. With cgi you control every aspect of an image and everything contributes to the realism of the end result (good or bad). The importance of each feature heavily depends on the content of your scene. (e.g. a photo of a white wall will be hard to distinguish from a white cgi image. A complex jungle scene, on the other hand, with lots of plants, animals and humans will contain more hints whether or not it is real. And it will be a lot easier to fool viewers with random cgi stones than human faces.)
Maybe you can start with creating a list of aspects of rendered images and think of each of those as a scale with increasing realism.
rough/simplified shapes => high details / accuracy
That really makes me think, why do humans feel uneasy/spooked when they see an almost but not really realistic looking human?
Was there ever a time in our history when human-looking shapeshifter-predators roamed the earth and the survival of the individual/species depended on correctly recognizing them?
Almost realistic = still in the uncanny valley.
There are many examples in Hollywood movies, but there are also those that pass the test, because a huge number of people don’t perceive them as artificial anymore, which of course is depend on distance to camera, movement etc.
I think getting the look accurate happens often these days, the uncanny effect often comes from the movement itself which betrays the look.
After all there are how many facial muscles in a human face? 80?
And how many bones are usually put into an CG face? Probably not as much, therefore the rule of simulation applies, a system with less data never matches the more complex reality.
I am a bit confused. You say you are a PhD student. At that level of education, it should be trivial for you to figure out a methodology to objectively judge photorealism of the images.
You simply gather large enough data set of synthetic computer generated images with varying levels of what an average person would considered “realism” (not obviously stylized), and a large enough data set of photographs of similar subjects/topics to the computer generated images data set.
Then you make a simple system which displays random images from both data sets, and for each image, asks people in a randomly selected test group whether they think given image is a photo or a computer generated image.
Once you have gathered data, you filter out the photographs, and then you sort the computer generated image results by the percentage of correct answers. If you sort it in an ascending order, then the computer generated images which were voted to be photographs the most (the incorrect answer) are the most realistic ones in the data set.
So the criteria is simple: How many percent of randomly selected people would confuse given computer generated image for a photo. The larger the percentage, the more photorealistic given image is.
Yeah, right. Ten thousand years of running, hiding and fighting. Imagine the mindset of our ancestors having to deal with fallen angels, demons, annuaki, aliens, demigods, whatever they are… looking at our current predicament I have the creepy feeling they are back, or worse, they never left, wearing our skin pretending they are human.
I think she looks kinda fake and uncanny. Also 480p…come on now.
Take a look at these:
Also if you want to see these clips in slightly better quality, try to find them on vimeo, they are there, found them via google search, but only accessible with an vimeo account (which I don’t have).
