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.
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.
Bad practical effects do exist, but even when bad they don’t look “unnatural”.
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.
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.
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.
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, but 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.
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?
> It's a computer wallpaper that monopolistic megacorp funded to show off how wealthy it is.
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.
The Win XP field was the opposite. It was organic, calming, and oddly fascinating because you couldn't tell if it was a plain photo or an edit or... what. And it had an unexpected reference to the Windows branding in the composition.
Win 10 was more like meaningless window-shaped visual noise.
Like it or not, art exists in a vacuum. It does not need to justify its existence. That's the very definition of art.
Disagree, HEAVILY, a ton of the biggest marvels in the world are so because of how much work was put into them.
The proportions and composition are weird, messy, and obviously asymmetric in both axes. Both the horizontals and verticals are slightly off, which makes it feel unsettled.
It seems quite clumsily edited, with a blotchy cut-off at the left that feels claustrophobic and doesn't seem to be there for a good aesthetic reason.
IMO it would have been stronger and more powerful rotated left through 90 degrees so the light was shining down.
blender: https://i.imgur.com/0BjMWi3.jpeg
original: https://i.imgur.com/GGwVibG.jpeg
blender (frame 0): https://i.imgur.com/XIV8Hma.png
original: https://i.imgur.com/GGwVibG.jpeg
Also, it includes a caveat:
> Unfortunately, due to the nature of volumetric rendering, I was unable to economically render the final animation at a high resolution with enough samples. So I had to resort to denoising, which sadly degraded the image quality and made it a bit flickery.
> Perhaps, with enough computing power, I'll be able to return to this project in the future and provide a cleaner final render.
Classic
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.
Reminds me of the Spaghetti Sorting algorithm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_sort
>> contact-and-removal operation takes constant time, the worst-case time complexity of the algorithm is O(n).
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 point is that reality itself is highly parallel
1. how fast your hand can reach for the next spaghetti piece - on average proportional to the radius of the pile of spaghetti, which is proportional to sqrt(n).
2. to actually notice the biggest piece, you need to again wait for a time proportional to sqrt(n) - light propagation is not instant.
So if we start thinking about this algorithm more like a computer scientist would (how fast it is as n grows to the infinity) it doesn't seem to be O(n) IMO.
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.
How do you let the "world" remove your greasy fingerprints from the glass?
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.
But a side note on this:
> 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.
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.
People have done simpler realtime rigs with off-the-shelf hardware and software in the past decade: see "The Dog Of Wisdom", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-UmfqFjpl0 which was made with Blender and a Leap Motion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a_M9VsZ6Lk
And now we are completely drowning in VTubers, who use software like Live2d that analyzes a webcam image and uses it to control the motions of a pre-made 2D character. I've only ever seen it done to spice up the video of people streaming video games but I'm sure there's someone doing no-budget cartoons with it. There's also Adobe Character Animator, which has been used for various TV stuff like a live performance of Homer Simpson or a few low-budget shows.
And then there's VRChat; a few thousand dollars of head-mounted display/facial capture/body trackers and you can get realtime full-body tracking. There's probably someone fucking around with making movies this way too.
At this point I'm pretty sure that you could get most of the functionality of that hand-tooled puppetry gizmo by just taking a sock and gluing a couple of ping-pong balls onto it and tweaking some tracking software.
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!
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.