Have you ever noticed how whenever some YouTube video proudly announces that they will teach you how to make a “realistic” [insert whatever scene here], the results that they show are anything but?
This morning yet another “realistic” post for a new tutorial came out which proves my point.
Just do a search on Blender Nation for the term “realistic” and you’ll see what I mean.
I get that it’s mostly all click-bait stuff, but it does make me wonder how many people are actually able to discern between realistic and completely fake looking?
Last I checked, Blendernation has long since become more of an aggregator of what Blender users are posting on various websites (in terms of art, content, ect…) rather than a journalistic news source highlighting the best of Blender.
This is where Youtube’s strength of democratizing training content also becomes its biggest weakness, there is nothing preventing someone from making a tutorial on ‘realism’ that is anything more than slapping the Principled Shader on everything and rendering it with the default settings (the latter which are optimized to be fast over being realistic, not even acknowledging that rolling your own with the individual blocks can get you better results in many cases)
Yeah, I get that. But I do wonder if fundamentally a lot of people have a pretty radically different idea of what constitutes “realistic”
For me the definition is pretty basic – when I look at the image, do I have a hard time figuring out if it’s actual camera footage, or a CG scene? If the answer is yes, then it’s realistic!
I keep referring to this video as one of the best examples of what I would consider realistic CG. When I watch it, I have a hard time discerning it from actual camera footage filmed on location.
For me, the camera movement in the Winter Cabin video is unrealistic. If it were a person guiding the camera, the camera would have to go up when crossing the wall. If it were a drone, the slight shaking of the camera, which is obviously meant to suggest footsteps, wouldn’t fit.
As a photo, however, this would be a very realistic-looking scene, no doubt.
You say it’s very realistic CG for you, I immediately noticed the fake camera. “Reality” in CG is understood and perceived differently.
It’s interesting, and while I do agree with you that I’m not a fan of the camera movement, I do also think that it’s not that different from a Ronin-S or DJI Ronin 4D type of movement. I see it a lot in films, most recently in The Killer and The Creator which at times used those types of stabilization rigs.
We’ve had this conversation before and yes, realistic is just like everything else subjective. CG artist with trained eyes views things differently than casual viewer. You can check “realistic” artworks on Instagram and how people praise them, say they didn’t realize it was CG, while it looks like shit. We’re at the point that we can notice which procedural texture dirt map is using, we’re not good judges for realism. And as Cycles - Octane thread showed even trained people have different definitions of realism.
That being said, Blender content on Youtube is mostly absolute trash, in every field. I discourage my students from following them and I try to pick good ones for them when I see one. Besides clickbaits and all that stuff, most Youtubers are just not good at Blender, they don’t have knowledge of the software. What we have now is constant recycling of 2.8 tutorials. People got their knowledge from when 2.80 happened and wave of tutorials hit the internet, and they just post same videos. Not many bother to even try and update their knowledge, let alone get specialized education if the field that isn’t specific to software.
Isn’t this the definition of this word… real versus real-is-tic → as much as real something could be within using any particular technic… ( or restrictions )…
…so… the tutorials aren’t claiming to be “real”…
…Okay then being artistic also does not mean making art… but making “only some” performance…
Every language is sooo strange to use… all this different meanings…
…according click-bait…
xx made simple…
yy in three easy steps…
zz rendering X- times faster…
stop doing it wrong…
i did… and survived…
i tried… and this happend…
re-making… this game / tv-show/ movie with…
watching this will blow you mind…
Seriously:
You are totally right… someone has to look closely at the teacher/ tutor…
Thinking about realistic:
You can build a realistic skeleton for animations, with realistic proportions, but to make the avatar for which the skeleton is to be used look realistically like a human being is very difficult.
In my opinion, the word “realistic” is used far too often. Carelessly perhaps? Simply because it sounds good? In other cases it is used deliberately. Enter “realistic” in the search function at blenderartists.org. So much realistic or REALISTIC.
There are funny ways of increasing the meaning, such as “ultra realistic”. Can something be more realistic than realistic? Or “best realistic” or “realistically stylised” or “hyper realistic” or “stylised model with realistic materials”. All very strange neologisms.
I know people mean “as realistic as possible”. (Ok, somehow stylised doesn’t fit in at all.) Well, the more the term “realistic” is used, the more it wears out.
I want to improve and push how much realism can I achieve with cycles, it’s a reality that in others renderers we can achieve realism easer (I have used corona, Octane and vray in the past), so if you can say me what you think about these renders I will be grateful
@Okidoki you made my day lol, i had a blurred version of this list in my mind, thanks for making it official in a very clean way. i just want to add one entry
make XXX in YY minutes.
when i see those titles in your list I don’t just skip… i click on those 3 dots => don’t suggest this Channel anymore!! (maybe that’s why the list got blurred cause i don’t see much of them a lot now)
JK: “Make a spider man animation in 5 minutes” … dude you just saved my career!!! boss called and said you have 10 minutes to make a spider man animation. i watched your video in 5 and made it in another 5 and i still have a job
any of those titles is a sign that 99.9% the video will be stealing your time to selling to youtube.
The grass is weirdly uniform, there is no transition to the plants at the base of the tree, the glass divider walls have no visible hardware, the trees seem out of place, no debris, no wear, etc.
‘Realism’ is 99% assets. That’s probably why that worldcreator commercial looks so good, it’s a commercial for their asset generation pack, and even then it’s limited. Zoom in to the ground and you will quickly see a lack of diversity. Look closely at the water and you will see homogenous noise, Compare the trees and you will start seeing duplicates. But from a helicopter’s eye view, it looks decent.
The world is complex and the interwoven webs of complexities are what looks ‘realistic’. Polished perfect glass, clean paving, uniform grass are very simple, and thus can look unrealistic. Even ‘realistic’ assets just slapped together in an ‘unrealistic’ way will look fake, your nighttime render with the winter bare tree, next to a fully leafed out tree, next to a palm tree looks weird. Grass growing uniformly right up to the trunk of a tree isn’t how grass or trees work.
A huge part of the CG artist’s job is to imply more complexity than there is. If you instanced 1 tree to make a forest, it would look very fake, but if you instanced 10 different models, you could probably convince most people that there are more unique trees than that. This is why interior architecture is relatively easy to get a decent amount of ‘realism’, every thing in the built environment is manufactured and thus artificial. You can buy a handful of asset packs, arrange your dollhouse, take some pretty pictures of it and it will look ‘realistic’. Nature rendering is much harder, though again, with a good asset pack and not looking too close at anything, you can convince most people who don’t spend much time outside…
I still get a kick out of the term, “photorealistic.” Because nothing about “a photo” is actually “realistic.” Especially not when “real film” is involved. You have to plan and design what you want to do, to achieve the effect that you are looking for.
I do not see the point of pursuing “photrealism” outside of live film VFX shots or real life product & Archvis.
There are so many elements in a shot that have to meet the realism standard and one or two always fail.
just look at any animated unreal metahuman demo …they look all like creepy animated corpses.
I prefer to stick with slightly stylized renders and focus on narrative and story telling.
Now I think we’re getting into semantics. I think the idea is the ability to generate a CG scene that blends in fairly effortlessly with in-camera footage and which the general audience doesn’t question.
Sure, we might get into a conversation about the “average Joe” not being able to tell the difference, and I think they might not when it comes to the specifics as of why something looks less convincing than it should, but unavoidably the terms “cheap VFX” starts appearing in reviews and online comments, which leads me to believe that on some level, even the average person is aware that something is not quite right.
Well, there are a few things to consider, realistic can be used as opposed to stylized, then it’s more about art direction style rather than “this could be mistaken for a photo”.
I don’t think anyone is mistaken that it’s not CG, but for a beginner these tutorials might help to get at least a result.
As professional we all know that there are a lot of things to account for in a photo realistic render / VFX , if we miss any of them it’s a clue that it’s CG. On top of that there is a bunch of artistic skills to have to make it look “cinematic” just like the two examples you posted. It’s obvious that a fraction of CG artists really know that well, and it’s not something the average youtuber really masters.
We know that professionals don’t have time to produce a lot of quality content so most tutorials we found is made by beginners / hobbyist and they rarely covers in-depth materials.
That’s more something we start to see in courses, but even there at some point we are left alone and have to mix some bits of knowledge learned here and there.
Finally people like to throw adjective at anything : “how to create a satisfying animation of a realistic cube with uplifting lighting and cinematic compositing” .
It’s very likely that none of these adjective will appears to be really true…
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