[MUD-Dev] Graphic MUDS/Ultima Online

[clawrenc at cup.hp.com]

In <199708040104.SAA03131 at user2.inficad.com>, on 08/03/97 
   at 06:00 PM, Adam Wiggins <nightfall at user2.inficad.com> said:

>I've never seen a descent looking 3D landscape, realtime or rendered. 
>Organic shapes just don't take well to polygons, and it's difficult
>to get the rich colors of a fantasy world in 3D.

This has a lot more to do with artistic liberties than it has to do
with the quality of 3D rendering.  Human artists will regularly doctor
a picture, adding shadows where there logically should be none, or
pulling a bright colour further out, because it balances the visual
whole.  

There's a rather well known case of a Van Gogh(?) study of a roof
scape in Venice where one of the roofs is a rather bright orange.  The
painting itself is wonderful to look at.  However, if you track the
direction of shadows, and the location of the roof, there is no
physical way that roof could be in sunlight, it should be in deep
shadow.  Similarly there is another Venetian scene by Canalleto
(actually he tended to do this rather a lot) showing a scene outside
the Doje's palace where a large stetch of wall and canal, which
logically should be in bright sunlight, are shown instead in fairly
heavy shadow.

The reason is the same for both cases: if the painting had shown the
scene as it actually was, it would have been visually unbalanced.  The
eye would have tended to track to the "uninteresting" parts of the
picture, and the scene as a whole would have seemd too "heavy" on one
side.

Its also worth looking at the pre-Raphealites and Turner (I'm a huge
Turner fan) for other wonderful examples of artistic license..

There's also a long tradition of changing the perspective and scale
for the critical scenes in a picture and de-emphasizing and reducign
the scale and perspective for the minor scenese.  Sometimes this can
be as subtle merely picking out the colours in the main scene with a
little more care and distinctness, or washing the minor scenese with a
slight dullness or shadow,  

--
J C Lawrence                           Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------------(*)               Internet: clawrenc at cup.hp.com
...Honorary Member Clan McFUD -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...