The Power Of Computer Graphics - Photorealism & Modern Path Tracing Rendering

Is It Live Or Is It Memorex?

So unless you are a professional it would be really, perhaps, really hard to tell if this image was a photograph or if it is a computer generated image.

A lot has changed over the years to promote this change. Early computers were very limited with processing power and both temporary and permanent storage which vastly limited the ability of computers to generate images. Many computers could not generate anything other than monochrome images that we very pixelated. Even the computers that could generate color could maybe do 4 to 8 colors on the screen at any one time.

In the real world humans are said to be able to see something like 7,000,000 different colors and compared to some animals that is a small number. For more information on the colors we can see check out the info links below.

8 Bit Color

The image that you see above was at one time pretty advanced for a home computer and for years this was pretty close to the state of the art.

The image above was representative of what even expensive CAD /Computer Aided Design Systems of the era were able to produce. Basically they were fancy systems for drawing lines.

Tron

Computer graphics took enormous amounts of computer power to create and one of the first movies to use computer graphics was the movie Tron. Tron was released on July 9, 1982 in 1,091 theaters in the United States. For many of us the mere fact that a computer had been used in the making of a feature length theatrical motion picture was simply amazing. The producers turned to one of the fastest computers at the time the venerable Super Foonly F-1. Even then most of the effects were monochomatic 2d compositions over the live film.

Lawn Mower Man & Max Headroom

Not many years after that computers really started to hit their stride but most high end computer graphics sat well outside the price range of the average consumer. Lawnmower Man Was an other large leap for computer graphics in film.

Max Headroom

From WikiPedia: is a fictional artificial intelligence (AI) character, known for his wit and stuttering, distorted, electronically sampled voice. He was introduced in early 1984. This again took a ton of computer power

Path Tracing Rendering Systems & Physically Based Shaders

As time went on computer graphics has change considerably and so have the systems and software that produce them. There are two recent developments that have helped one is know as Path Tracing Renderers and the other is know as Physically Based Shaders both use real world light physics to produce the images that we now see on our screens today.

The first two images that are on this article were first modeled in a program called 3ds Max and then were rendered in Corona Render as marketing pieces for client who builds outdoor entertainment centers.

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Info Links

8 Bit Color - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-bit_color
Color and human human vision: https://www.colormatters.com/color-and-vision/color-and-vision-matters