Repeatedly in the process of work, I conscientiously tried to stretch photorealistic textures (plaster, brick, roofing material, etc.) on the models, but I was never satisfied with the result. For this, by the way, I often received cuffs: they say, my work is not realistic enough and the quality of graphics is garbage.
So I want to devote this post to 2 concepts - "realism" and "graphic quality", and it boils down to the thesis that these are completely different concepts, although they are often identified.
Realism is how much the picture on the screen corresponds to reality. Graphic quality is how much this picture is pleasing to the eye.
It's bad when a picture tries to represent what it is not. If a building on the screen tells you: "I have rich architecture" (but low geometric detail), or: "I have brickwork" (but blurry textures), or: "I follow classical architectural canons" (but it clearly disproportionate) - all this is bad, because the picture is trying to deceive your eyes. Creating photorealism for games with millions of polygons and high-resolution textures is inappropriate, and a low-quality parody of reality is unacceptable. In addition, eye-catching realism is enough in my life, so I never had the desire to drag it to the screen.
I see the only solution to this problem in conventionality, that is, a conscious simplification of reality. But the main thing is that this simplification must be honest so as not to turn into that same low-quality parody. For this reason, my work does not try to deceive the viewer and imitate reality. It says: "Yes, I am a building, but a conditional building (if you like, cartoonish), with an unrealistic idealization of shapes and surfaces." I always try to draw the shape (albeit simplified) with geometry and don't like normals, because it is a visual deception tool. And if some elements do not look true enough, I usually refuse them. Apparently, this is why minimalism is the most preferable for me, since this style is more frank than others able to talk about its form.
Painting can be cited here as an example: today there are only a few photorealistic works in the world, but this does not make all other paintings bad, because painting is an artistic, authorial, subjective view of reality. The same is true in modeling, where the main task of the author (like any sculptor) is to convey not the form, but the impression of it. And conventionality in this case serves as a tool for additional expressiveness: discarding realistic specifics, it focuses attention on the idea.
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