51 replies
11h18m
I've been spending a lot of time on photography (though mostly w/ film cameras) during recent years, and only recently realized this is actually photographed. (It took long because I'm a long-time Linux user, so I barely seen the image.)
Many people say this would've been easier with VFX, but I disagree. The image has highly convincing details that would take a long time even for highly talented VFX artists to nail. Instead, with a camera, you can let the world do the work for you. The studio setup is also very simple (cardboard + acrylic panel + projector + fog) and easy to experiment with. I'm pretty sure photography was the right tool for the project.
Here's someone recreating the same wallpaper on Blender in 13 minutes: https://youtu.be/EIfrP365iTQ
Looks good but rather too foggy and not as crisp as the original which is much more detailed. Video artifacts notwithstanding.
blender: https://i.imgur.com/0BjMWi3.jpeg
original: https://i.imgur.com/GGwVibG.jpeg
IMHO it's not even close.
Agreed. As a tech artist, I'm 100% positive I could get a bang-on reproduction using Arnold or some other really solid photorealistic rendering engine, but it would probably take longer than using real cameras, practical props, and doing a bit of massaging in post. The modeling, color, camera angle/focus length/etc. are all really easy. Tweaking the subtleties in the light, glass shaders, fog, etc to get them good would take quite some time. It would only make sense if it needed to be animated or you needed a bunch of versions with modifications. Definitely a 'use the right tool for the job' kind of thing.
TBF, the blender version you reference was from an animation, not the first single still render.
blender (frame 0): https://i.imgur.com/XIV8Hma.png
original: https://i.imgur.com/GGwVibG.jpeg
Also, it includes a caveat:
Copying is a lot easier than creating though, the Windows team had to start from scratch
Your comment made me laugh because out of context, it suggests “the Windows team” is averse to copying things.
The time lapse is 13 minutes long.
Not that I'm saying the video doesn't show some skill, but creating a fresh image from scratch is quite a different task from recreating an existing one directly from a reference.
It doesn't look as good and Blender/3d modeling software in general have come a long way in the last 9 years or so (Windows 10 came out in 2015)
Sure it could can/could be done but it would take a lot of time to get as good a result. Probably easier to just photograph it for real and photoshop a little bit.
The video is 13 minutes, but its a time lapse so it could have been hours or days of work.
Looks terrible and not all that similar.
Regardless, the photographers may well encounter those amazing "happy accidents" (something that so rarely happens when I use software).
Which details are you thinking of? I was under the impression that with ray tracing, physically based materials, and fluid dynamics our computers wouldn't be hard-pressed to realistically render a static scene with light (of varying coherence and other properties) going through a piece of plastic and hitting swirling fog.
The parameters of the scene need to be set up, yes, but then it would be just as easy to generate a few thousand frames from it. Also it's easier to version control for experimentation.
In 2015 (almost 10 years ago now) the tech probably wasn't as convincing as it is today. But I agree you could probably get like 90% there
The Stranger Things intro scene is CGI. Artists were consulted who originally created similar titles in the 80s with practical effects to see how they could do it too. The old-school artists said to just do it in CGI because that’s what they would have done.
People don’t hate CGI - they hate bad CGI. It’s hard to explain, but you know it when you see it.
Bad practical effects do exist, but even when bad they don’t look “unnatural”.
I recall Amazon’s Lord of the Rings title sequence [1] received some criticism for looking fake, even though they filmed it practically [2]. I’d guess it was due to folks assuming title sequences are CGI, combined with the fact that few people really know what poured liquid metal is supposed to look like.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV-dDyYgwkc
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZEpWvQFXqQ
There's a similar problem with gunshots and explosions - we want what movies have given us which is not what they actually act/sound like - so much so that live recordings of actual gunfire/explosions is often deemed "fake".
This is also the American/bald eagle problem. When people hear their actual cries, they’re often confused.
Speaking of "Bad CGI", the making of the HBO Intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agS6ZXBrcng
That’s a reasonable guess if you don’t follow graphics developments, but the tech for producing realism hasn’t changed that much in the last 10 years, most of the realism developments have been incremental. The main thing that’s happened in CG in the last 10 years is speed and scale improvements. There were great fake-or-real CG photo contests in 2015 and earlier where some of the CG was photoreal enough to trick most people. The Windows wallpaper definitely could have been 100% there 10 years ago, for a skilled CG artist who knew what they wanted. The reasons for doing it practical don’t necessarily hinge on whether it was possible to do it in CG, there are good reasons to do it physically anyway.
Specular reflections and diffuse media (fog) makes for massive render times though, in my experience.
I did something similarish with water a long time ago, using a spectral renderer, finding spectral data for ocean water absorption and reflection, realistic spectral sun/sky model, and a physically-based ocean wave simulator to create the surface.
The underwater "caustic god rays" looked very nice and realistic, and setting it all up was easy once I had found the data. But it took ages to get rid of the noise.
Yes. But why would you do all these computer-ish things to provide a backdrop for a computer? Where is the creativity in that? Where is the attitude, the whimsy, the irony, the juxtaposition?
Considering how much of current technology stems from geeks just proving that their crazy idea could work and looking for money for it afterwards, the disrespect here for another geek's craft and intuitions is wild.
Reminds me of the Spaghetti Sorting algorithm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_sort
Interesting but I am not sure I understand this:
How is the contact-and-removal operation constant time? How can that assumption ever be true? If you use a parallel processor like human vision or human feel (ie. which pressure nerve activates on the hand) it may appear constant, but if you use a computer it would be n right (as you would need to check n slots). Wouldn't either defy O(n)?
The analog algorithm described is not described for digital computer. It’s an amusing theoretical thought experiment and not a recipe for actual fast sorting. It’s O(n) when you use your hand for contact and removal. I don’t know if it’s possible to implement spaghetti sort on a computer, maybe not, but I guess if it were possible, it would probably at least require n processors to sort n elements. Maybe the nearest analogy on digital computers is radix sort.
Radix sort is probably the closest usable one, but a more direct translation would probably be sleep sort.
Oh yeah I forgot about sleep sort, that is similar and also more in the same spirit as spaghetti sort. ;)
You're talking about some other kind of sort.
You can simplify the "human hand" to a rigid metal sheet that comes down from the top and stops on the highest object. Still constant time, but no "parallel processing" needed.
The point is that reality itself is highly parallel
That's how some 'trick' card decks work, for anyone unfamiliar
Spaghetti Sorting is just one of the Analog Gadgets called out in Dewdney's "The Armchair Universe" (originally in his Computer Recreations column in "Scientific American"). There are many other cool ones (beginning on page 28):
https://archive.org/details/armchairuniverse0000dewd_x2e7/
Nah that's post hoc rationalization. The amount of busy-work that went into it is ridiculous. Just because a colossal amount of effort was poured in this wallpaper doesn't mean that they used the right tool for the job or that the output was better because of it.
You're thinking like an engineer, and speak as if there is a right amount of time to spend on artistic endeavours; if you cross this threshold for you it is a "ridiculous and colossal amount of effort".
Budget aside, art isn't constrained or criticized by how much effort the artist put in.
All that matters is the result. A wallpaper or any other artistic creation isn't less beautiful or evocative because the artist spent thousands of hours on it.
No, he's just being realistic.
Even without getting into semantics about "what is art", the reality is that this is promotional material for advertising. This wasn't commissioned by a rich patron to put up on exhibition for MoMA.
This isn't to take away from the artists skill, effort, creativity etc. but the context of this is inherently a business and economic decision. There's no artistic impetus, no political/social/cultural message.
It's a computer wallpaper that monopolistic megacorp funded to show off how wealthy it is. It's a very typical "look at how much money we spent" exercise to showcase success or whatever.
You know, it's art even if it has no ambitions to be exhibited at the MoMA.
Groan. It's not possible to have a serious discussions with someone starting from such a cynical position. After all, what is even the point of creating anything? We're all going to turn to dust and be forgotten forevermore.
99.9999% of all art is not commissioned by a rich patron to put up on exhibition for MoMa. It's just something that artists do.
IT geeks are all for imposing their own creative restrictions on their work -- using Haskell when the competition is using PHP, developing their own distributed network persistence layer on top of SQLite when there are products out there that already exist but they just don't like for pseudospiritual reasons.
But artists who just make pictures are expected to be cost-effective and not to put any value on their artisanship?
> Even without getting into semantics about "what is art"
They say, before making comments about what they think is art :-)
> There's no artistic impetus, no political/social/cultural message.
There is, as you state in your next couple of sentences:
> … monopolistic megacorp funded to show off … typical "look at how much money we spent" exercise to showcase
You can, probably rightly, call it a crappy impetus. But that was impetus for the exercise and could be called the artistic impetus. Even if you disagree strongly on that particular point, it is definitely a message.
To be slightly more fair, that wallpaper is a major part of the initial impression people have of the OS version, much like XP's Telly Tubby Hill did. The XP image was trying to convey “friendly, welcoming”, the Win10 one tries to convey something more like “dynamic, technically competent, flashy”. While it may not be an expression of someone's inner feelings or a societal property or anything like that, some art is more about directing your impression of something than it is about expressing someone else's and that is what this image was for and what it does.
There's a right amount of time for artistic endeavours and it has all been used up by our niche metaprogramming project.
"All that matters is the result. A wallpaper or any other artistic creation isn't less beautiful or evocative because the artist spent thousands of hours on it."
Disagree, HEAVILY, a ton of the biggest marvels in the world are so because of how much work was put into them.
I would have used VFX for this as I'm pretty sure it would have been more cost effective to achieve a similar result. Most people, like me, probably just assumed this was VFX anyway. But I'm glad Microsoft didn't though, as this is a fascinating story and case study.
Microsoft surely wasn’t too worried about the cost.
the ironic thing is they have all those photos of real life places they use for wallpaper those are all photshopped to an insane degree to remove the ugly trees and clouds and other natural formations and make the colors extremely different
Honestly it’s way more satisfying to work analog. Experiencing the colors in “real life” spatially. Also, collaborating with others and being able to share the process in a studio rather than on a screen is an amazing experience.
Another thing is the fog rising up to create diffusion on the light. Even the best VFX in the world will only ever be an approximation to the real thing.
I think if you handed this image to a VFX artist and said “make this,” they could do it. They probably could have done it back in 2015, too.
But the team making this image didn’t have it in advance. They just had some ideas they wanted to try out.
The story of how it was made is not just the story of the techniques they used, but also how they applied and adjusted those techniques to try things and see how it looked.
This image was “made” in that people built the stuff that was photographed, but it was also kind of “discovered” in that they tried a bunch of things until they discovered what they liked.
That’s possible in VFX too, but the process is different and too many iterations can quickly erase any cost advantage. This is one reason animated movies are disciplined about locking the script early in production. You can’t cost-effectively improv your way through an animated movie the way a director and actors can with a camera and a set.
I agree with all of this -- particularly the exploration and discovery aspects.
But a side note on this:
The Jim Henson Company is working on exactly the technology that supports this, actually -- the business of live puppetry capture as distinct from, say, motion capture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzbBdRHqGcQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDIlylZwLJE
This kit is expensive/bespoke but I don't know that it's _that_ expensive, set against how much money goes into making movies with large-scale bluescreen work these days. And it's wholly amenable to improv.
I always assumed it was CG because there are aspects that look unrealistic to me, in particular the bloom along the edges is too bright compared to the illumination of the rest of the panes and the light beams coming from the on the corners looked artificial. Turns out it looks this way because they projected brighter light on the edges and corners. Neat.
When I saw this headline I mixed up windows versions and thought it was going to be about the Windows 11 Bloom backgrounds, which I always assumed were made with physical materials, but it seems like I am wrong about that one too, hah!
Absolutely, there is no happy accidents in VFX.
How do you let the "world" remove your greasy fingerprints from the glass?
Also pretty sure it was the fun tool for the project.