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Piranesi's Perspective Trick (2019)

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Re: Piranesi's Perspective Trick (2019)

#21

Post by jackstraw14 »

bemmu wrote: post #13

I'll take this opportunity to drop the fact that I'm kind of obsessed with the book "Piranesi", where the main character (named after the artist in the article) survives in a world which is just endless corridors of classical architecture, statues, and staircases. It's an incredibly calming experience, I've listened to the audiobook over 10 times before sleep. Highly recommended.

Read the book once, will definitely check out the audiobook. I got in the habit of reading it before bed too, sounds perfect.

Re: Piranesi's Perspective Trick (2019)

#22

Post by amelius »

I really hate it when a designer takes a perspective rendering with the camera really close, and then modifies the object so that it looks that way from a normal distance. Not sure if that's what happened here (can't read the article), but designers should not do that.

Re: Piranesi's Perspective Trick (2019)

#23

Post by jihadjihad »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #17

> it isn’t possible to construct a camera or a computer program to render a view that does this Hmmm > The mathematics of this is quite simple If so then surely a program could be written

It confused me too, and maybe I am wrong, but I took it to mean, "can't render an existing (i.e. non-Piranesi) view into Piranesi perspective." Meaning, if you're an artist starting from scratch, you could do it (using the math given)--and some of those examples seem like aspects of one drawing employ Piranesi perspective while others don't.

So maybe the author was just saying if the work was drawn with "true" perspective throughout, there isn't a programmatic way of converting the entire thing over to Piranesi. That's at least how I read it, I'm curious about it too!

Re: Piranesi's Perspective Trick (2019)

#24

Post by jcalx »

bonoboTP wrote: post #14
SamBam wrote: post #10

> By legibility I mean that the Piranesi distortion is easier to read, and that to anyone unfamiliar with photographs, that hasn’t grown up with TV, photographs and magazines, the Piranesi version would look much better, and the true perspective would look rather odd. I think this is a key point that people are often unaware of. For instance, whenever I see a modern artist who has painted photorealistic art, I read d…

> rather we ignore the blurry parts unless we specifically try to notice them, and anything we try to focus on becomes sharp. Unrelated to perspective: Artists often put more detail in places that you're "supposed to" look at, and leave other things more as a blurry sketch, and our eyes naturally don't linger on those parts. What's interesting to me is that I can often recognize AI art by the way it doesn't make use…

I learned this back when I used to make maps for Source games (Team Fortress 2, CS:Source, etc.) — at first I sprinkled props and detailed geometry equally throughout the level, but it's better (in terms of art direction, player attention, and performance optimization) to put details in places that "matter". Valve does this [0] in their official maps and it's actually hard to notice until you really pay attention to it.

[0] https://nodraw.net/2010/08/tf2-density-of-detailing/

Re: Piranesi's Perspective Trick (2019)

#25

Post by ibaikov »

Wow, this is SO cool! It looks better because you can see the details of objects far from the 'camera'. This is basically what you do when you are there in reality, constantly refocusing on objects. This perspective trick to me is a map of zones on the picture on which I will focus.

I wonder what would happen if we'd render videos using it, and maybe games? Could this be a solution to better graphics? Would movement ruin it? Please tell me!

Re: Piranesi's Perspective Trick (2019)

#26

Post by asicsp »

bemmu wrote: post #13

I'll take this opportunity to drop the fact that I'm kind of obsessed with the book "Piranesi", where the main character (named after the artist in the article) survives in a world which is just endless corridors of classical architecture, statues, and staircases. It's an incredibly calming experience, I've listened to the audiobook over 10 times before sleep. Highly recommended.

A very different book, but I loved reading "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell" [0] as well by the same author.

[0] which used footnotes to great effect

Re: Piranesi's Perspective Trick (2019)

#27

Post by rossdavidh »

"So here is a general 2D remapping as a prototype replacement for the perspective tool in image editors (I have no ability to add this to GIMP, somebody else needs to step up)..."

Well given that this is HN, if there's any forum where somebody has experience contributing to GIMP, it should be here. Any takers?

Re: Piranesi's Perspective Trick (2019)

#28

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

That's a really cool article!

TIL.

It makes absolute sense, but I never even thought about doing it that way. I was trained as an artist, and I always did perspective the "classic" way. It's entirely possible that this might not work on some subject matter, but it works great on buildings.

Re: Piranesi's Perspective Trick (2019)

#29

Post by JKCalhoun »

jihadjihad wrote: post #23
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #17

> it isn’t possible to construct a camera or a computer program to render a view that does this Hmmm > The mathematics of this is quite simple If so then surely a program could be written

It confused me too, and maybe I am wrong, but I took it to mean, "can't render an existing (i.e. non-Piranesi) view into Piranesi perspective." Meaning, if you're an artist starting from scratch, you could do it (using the math given)--and some of those examples seem like aspects of one drawing employ Piranesi perspective while others don't. So maybe the author was just saying if the work was drawn with "true" perspe…

Yes, perhaps the computer needs information on which pixels belong to which buildings in order to apply perspective-per-object, rather than perspective-to-the-entire-image?

Re: Piranesi's Perspective Trick (2019)

#30

Post by jcalx »

Panini projection is built into Unity and Unreal. From the documentation from the latter [0] you can see how it's essentially a cropped fisheye-ish projection. That doc also has (in my opinion) a clearer comparison on how the two projections differ, especially looking at the layout of the square tiles on the floor in the first set of pictures.

[0] https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...

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