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Comment by drcode | Hacker News Reader

Darn, it looks like it won't be long before photo editing software can (1) Find stock models for all objects in a scene (2) Align them perfectly (3) Let you manipulate them arbitrarily (4) Render an output picture with all the changes applied that is virtually indistinguishable from a real photograph.

Once this happens (and it doesn't look like it'll take long) photography will no longer be an accurate reference for knowledge about the real world.

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> photography will no longer be an accurate reference for knowledge about the real world.

I think we passed that point a few years ago. The trick now is to lower the barrier so that it is more accessible to more people.

The state of the art in rendering looks perfect:

http://www.ronenbekerman.com/inspiration/

Our product, Clara.io, makes it possible to render things like this out in real-time:

https://clara.io/view/bee73adb-ed90-47c0-8048-93accd56ff80/r...

Ages ago. Photo editing is almost as old as photography. It just used to be a whole lot harder. For a particularly notorious example of high-quality pre-computer "photoshopping", see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Sov...

How fast should I be able to rotate? It's a little slow for me.

The real-time V-Ray raytracing is slow because it is very high quality -- it is doing real global illumination with no precalculations, favoring quality over speed.

For client side WebGL, click the Real-Time tab.

It would be cool if the position and rotation would be synchronized between the two, so I could choose a nice view in the Real-Time tab and switch over to Photo Realistic to get the raytraced version.

It works that way in the editor (although you need a Clara.io account and you need to be logged in) if you set up multiple viewports with the same camera.

Still not there for me. The devil is in the detail - the sauce and the strawberries in the food picture, the books in the desk picture. Also, I still haven't seen a rendering of a human being that looks genuinely photorealistic.

I used to love that technology was pushing towards this point when I was a kid. Now it scares me. Maybe I'm getting old..

These renderings of a girl look pretty damn realistic to me: http://vimeo.com/40602544

Those are pictures of an adult, not a child. When you use the word "girl" to describe an adult woman you're implicitly belittling her. Don't be that guy.

> Those are pictures of an adult, not a child. When you use the word "girl" to describe an adult woman you're implicitly belittling her. Don't be that guy.

Sorry, I'm not a native English speaker (so I'm not confident enough to downvote or anything), but your judging this use of “girl” as female version of “boy”, ignoring the overall mode of expression, doesn't seem adequate. I would have no objections if thomaseng's comment was more formal:

> I would consider these pictures of a girl quite lifelike

But it's not.

If I were the author, and the pictures were of a man, I'd totally say “guy”. Once you flip the gender, “guy” seems to become “girl”, not “woman”. (Again, given the overall informal style used.)

And as for the word “guy”, it doesn't sound in any way belittling a grown-up man (and you just used it yourself).

I would say that the male equivalent of "girl" is "boy", not "guy".

The English language is often unhelpful in that exact equivalents of the word you want that exist for one gender don't exist for the other, or else carry other connotations. Master vs Mistress for instance.

And the female equivalent of guy is girl. The word 'girl' genuinely has more shades than the submissive little box you want to put it in.

Did tumblr buy HN?

The are very good. Knowing they're renderings though, you can see it in the face and hair.

DanBC made an interesting comment - it would interesting to see renderings like these in a double blind test with photographs and see how well they stack up.

> the sauce and the strawberries in the food picture

Be interesting if people could correctly tell which images are renders and which are real, with > 50% accuracy, if they were given 50 sample images.

Because being told that an image is computer generated, and then saying "Yep, it's unrealistic" isn't particularly compelling argument.

I stand by that what I've mentioned looks fake (especially the strawberries and the sauce) but I think that would be a great exercise. Your brain believes what it expects. I had the expectation that these were renderings so it was easy to pick out flaws.

http://alteredqualia.com/xg/examples/deferred_skin.html

Maybe not completely realistic but getting pretty good, especially in a browser.

Did you know that much of the "photography" in shopping catalogues is already CGI?

http://www.dezeen.com/2013/11/27/cgi-renderings-for-catalogu...

http://petapixel.com/2012/08/24/ikea-slowly-shedding-photogr...

2 can already be done using active shape models.

http://www.isbe.man.ac.uk/~bim/Models/asms.html

You just described holy grail in 3D vision, AI and robotics. Being able to make sense of the world from a 2D image is one of the cornerstones for building artificial brain.

I wonder when this will happen for video. At some point, video evidence (from unverified third parties) will have to become inadmissible.

To be fair naive analysis for photography hasn't been accurate for a long time and these methods will leave traces.

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