As a painter, and 3D artist, I know that picrel is how you can turn anything great.
The question is, how do I know if I "got" it as in learned it? Any resources?
I've taken notes, tried to condense what I learned to try to explain to a 6 year old.
"Core shadow only indicates surface is hard"
"More midtones indicate surface is soft/round"
Stuff like that.
Do I have to say the entire thing or is there a shorter name for it?

>>1014786 (OP)
"If your shit is BRDF its real."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_reflectance_distribution_function

>>1014786 (OP)
Go back to /ic/, as a 3D artist you only need to turn ray tracing on

>>1014786 (OP)
When it comes to representing the kind of thing you ask about in computer graphics, dialing in rendering accuracy and having command of the
kind of look and feel of your final render you have to read enough that you understand a lot about the core concepts involved.

But then living it is something different; you learn about these things by meticulously dialing in shaders and materials, overshooting and undershooting while looking at reference images and contemplating what it is you're missing and still not representing well. What can and can't be achieved under your current renderer and why that is.

Getting high fidelity results in 3D rendering becomes very dependent on you having a technical understanding of the limitations of what we are doing.
How our display device represents light coupled with the quirks of human vision system to arrive at the standard we currently have.
How you utilize that correctly, properly set up a high dynamic range scene and use tone-mapping to best compress it into that 24-bit approximation
of reality available to us on standard displays.

There is no version of this 'a 6 year old can learn' because it is very confusing at times even to intelligent adults,
esp given the amount of misinformation or 'dumbed down' explanations you'll have to wade thru and recognize for what they are to get to the bottom line truths of what is actually happening.

Almost nodbody in CGI or art actually understands the finer aspects of these things to the point they could authoritatively speak on it.
Many declare what little they do understand as if it was the gospel truth tho.

>>1014820
>There is no version of this 'a 6 year old can learn' because it is very confusing at times even to intelligent adults,
>esp given the amount of misinformation or 'dumbed down' explanations you'll have to wade thru and recognize for what they are to get to the bottom line truths of what is actually happening.
How do I know if I learned it? This is why I keep taking notes on the same concept for 5 months. I need to understand it. I've tried just memorizing but I really want to "get" it.

>>1014831
pyw

>>1014831
>How do I know if I learned it?

The degree to which you actually understand this is tied to how well you could hold a unprompted talk on the subject accounting for the way nature operates and why we are seeing what we are seeing upon looking at a scene before us.

This splits into three major parts

1) how well you can explain the core phenomena in the electromagnetic environment you're in, which is a fancy sounding way of saying what
is emitting photons/light? Where is the light visible to us from any point in the scene really coming from? How does it end up where it is in the scene?
Is it harsh direct from a directional lightsource or softened/diffused thru a filter, is it ambient/bounced off other things in the environment?

2) What actually happens with a photon when it interacts with a spot on a object in the scene? This comes down to how an advanced 'BRDF' you can account for.
The 'Bi-Directional Distribution Function' is a term you'll hear a lot. What does it mean? It means that the outcome of what happens at a spot on the object a photon touches
depends on the angle between you the observer and the direction of the surface and the direction towards the lightsource that's the 'Bi-directional' bit.
Objects look different depending on where you place your lightsource relative to your vantage point or how you orient the surface in your view.

The 'Distribution Function' then is how much physical phenomena in the real world do you know/understand the behavior of once a photon interacts with it?

If you understand the Blinn/Lambert which is the most legacy basic BRDF we have you have an entry point to start answering the questions of Op's image authoritatively.
If you understand up to the current era PBR model you could comprehensively account for phenomena and gave about as good a understanding as anyone outside active research currently has.

>>1014880
>continued..

3) Understand the quirks of the human psycho-visual system and how we don't operate the same way a camera does and that our experienced image of the world is processed
by the brain, the dynamic range we can see differs from the way a camera sees the world. The things in a scene we notice/care/gravitate towards can be altered by
enhancing and suppressing reality to better conform with ideal experiences, why ~all TV movies are lit in ways that are completely unrealistic by off camera additional lights and reflectors.

So it hinges on how well you understand light conditions and materials such that you could explain and name the phenomena you are witnessing and describe how they work.
And how well you understand human psychology and psycho-visual cues to engineer imagery towards a desired experienced outcome.

It's the kind of thing that even once you 'get' but will continue to 'get' better even after decades of already knowing a lot about what you're doing.

>>1014881
You're lying through your teeth and you know it lol.

>>1014931
>You're lying

Not at all, I could sit down and write a PBR shader from scratch because I now understand the underlying phenomena.
But that doesn't mean I'm an expert or an authoritative source either, I'm still a student of these things relying on data and papers from
people who actually understand this as good as anyone to do most of what I do.

I've been doing digital art since the early 90's, 3D since 98, I learnt to code and write shaders about ~15 years ago.

Looking back I'd say I was about 30 years old when I started to have a coherent understanding of the shader pipe
at ~40 years old I'm still learning new things or refining my knowledge everytime I set out to tweak things in this regard.
Refreshing and reinforcing things I already knew to a higher degree as well as adding new nuance and insight.

Knowing a bit of real world physics and what actually happens in reality vs what we do in the computer grounds you and
makes you internalize how we've always been dealing with approximations of phenomena that we keep finding better ways to refine.
The fact we call our current era shaders 'physically based' is not the same as saying they are 'physically accurate'
What Jim Blinn did in the 70's was also 'Physically based' after all.

Looking back what I did as an artist prior to knowing about the physics and how rendering work was very impressionistic and confused compared
to what I do today if I sit down and render something, whether I do it manually with ink or paint or setting up a scene for rendering.

I look at an image now I could describe the optical phenomena I see and know what subtle effects to look for and how to account for them.
That was not the case when I was just an artist trying to capture the feel of what I saw, misunderstanding/misrepresenting optical phenomena.

>>1014938
Can u show ur art then?

>>1014940
Not without doxxing myself, but here's a personal project I've posted to /3/ before.
Someone thought I was talking out my ass that time too and asked me for some credentials to prove I knew what I was talking about when it came to character rigging and flexibility. It just so happens it uses some custom shaders I wrote for the max 2018 direct X viewport.