Recreating 3D renderings in real life

Oh wow, I've seen their 50c project before: http://skrekkogle.com/50c.html

Their projects are all so fantastic!

Yep, my first thought was that all of those "behind-the-scene" photos were 3d-rendered as well. Are we being fooled?

I was part of Cornell's Program of Computer Graphics lab for a few years. The lab still has the original physical Cornell Box model sitting around. That thing was wild to look at; even in real life, it doesn't look real because the walls are so close to perfectly diffuse, and it looks exactly like all of the rendered versions.

Only in so many words.

It was a block. It was made of wood, and it was a real thing you could hold in your hands.

The grain doesn't quite line up across the surfaces and the edges are unnatural. Quite a good simulation of someone 2D texture-mapping a block of wood, rather than the more expensive volumetric mapping.

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

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%.

>Guess it has something to do with the change in software UI language.

In the sense that software UI follows our societies general trends. And as always in design trends, there's a feedback loop.

I think it may also be that initially, skeumorphism was used to educated the general public as to the intuitions of the UI, but after that intuition become more and more widespread generally, the UI could turn into a more abstract and minimal form of the previously skeumorphic UI while retaining its properties / placements etc. This abstraction then allows interaction paradigms that cross-cut what is possible physically, or to add more to the now-abstract UI with less noise. Technology is changing of course, but also humans are changing collectively in learning to communicate with it. This is also historically present: at some point typing wasn't a thing, then some jobs did typing, and now typing is a widespread skill and allows interactions at a new level once that is established as assumed on the part of the user.