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:

> 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.

And so the remaining 20% of the work will take another 80% of effort.

Classic

No, not really. Increasing the volumetric samples + bounces size is fairly simple. It's just a value in the rendering tab.

The video is 13 minutes, but its a time lapse so it could have been hours or days of work.

Regardless, the photographers may well encounter those amazing "happy accidents" (something that so rarely happens when I use software).

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.

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.

Looks terrible and not all that similar.

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.

That's a cool animated wallpaper.