Hacker News Reader

It's amazing how much effort we need to go to make rendered scenes look realistic and real scenes look rendered.

Same with camera shake. In real life we try to reduce it, in CGI we add it.

And lens flares and chromatic aberration - lens manufacturers go to great lengths to remove these as much as they can, but games and VFX re-create them.

And plent of games and digitally shot movies add film grain.

Too-perfect stability makes your brain realize it is fake. It's the same reason music producers make their digital instruments play very slightly out of time.

From a software and algorithm perspective, yes - although what with measured materials and lights (in other words in physical units that match what they are in the real world), it's pretty trivial now to set up scenes in CG which match simple materials like the ones in this example.

What's still a not-quite solved problem (at least efficiency-wise) is displacement / lean / bump micro-surface detail (linked to microfacet response) and stuff like scattering and absorption (for skin, hair in particular) - we can approximate it very well, but still not quite 100%.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com