Previous discussion on HN (2019): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854161
Windows 10 wallpaper was physically built and photographed (2015)
261–270 of 291 posts
Re: Windows 10 wallpaper was physically built and photographed (2015)
#262I saw a photographer who mimicked the style of early 90s raytracing. Chrome spheres on checkerboards and such.
Re: Windows 10 wallpaper was physically built and photographed (2015)
#263Reminds me of someone once asking me how I got the hand-drawn pencil look to the type on an article in the typography magazine I published about the T-26 type foundry.
I drew it by hand with a pencil and scanned it.
I had another article headline where I commissioned an artist to carve the headline in stone and had it photographed for the printer.
Re: Windows 10 wallpaper was physically built and photographed (2015)
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
I agree with all of this -- particularly the exploration and discovery aspects. 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.yout…
They've been experimenting with this since at least 1989. https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Waldo_C._Graphic
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.
Re: Windows 10 wallpaper was physically built and photographed (2015)
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
>you can let the world do the work for you. Reminds me of the Spaghetti Sorting algorithm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_sort
Interesting but I am not sure I understand this: >> 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…
Depends on the mathematical framework you're working with.... there's a genre in theoretical compsci that deals with parallel algorithms, and as a toy example, I remember an O(1) sorting algo (given O(n^2) processors). This example is more fun than anything, but ofc in general you're free what constraints you subject your statements to.
Re: Windows 10 wallpaper was physically built and photographed (2015)
#266I also built a wall (with literal wallpaper even!) in order to create the cover for a genealogy book that I created. I knew what a wanted — an old fashioned looking wall with old-timey pictures of my relatives hanging on the wall. I also wanted a mantel with more photos standing on it that would run along near the bottom of the book cover. I tried initially creating the cover in a paint program — layering elements to…
The result is amazing! It reads the direction of the book on the cover.
Re: Windows 10 wallpaper was physically built and photographed (2015)
#267It's remarkable to know the process behind this work of art truely
Re: Windows 10 wallpaper was physically built and photographed (2015)
#268I'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.…
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.
I think the process of creation is the thing
Re: Windows 10 wallpaper was physically built and photographed (2015)
#269Never knew, always assumed it was just a render. Very cool!
Same here. And I think it was the purpose to make peopel assume that
Re: Windows 10 wallpaper was physically built and photographed (2015)
#270I hope someone will one day talk about me the way corporate america talks about its logos.
Brand identity is a big thing