In the thrilling world of advertising photography, the automotive sector is the most challenging one. Huge budgets, great technical effort, bodacious locations. The major league of high class photo production.
On location in the breathtaking scenery of a jagged desert canyon: a descending sun produces what we reverentially call “the magic hour”. Bustling activity within the crew. Lights are being set up. Final camera check. On a cliff, at the edge of a humungous gorge, there it stands: a little metal box with a strange glass dome on top …
A new trend is evolving: Car photography without cars.
It´s true. On more and more photo production sets for car advertising, the car is missing.
The magic word is RBV. Reality Based Visualisation. A technology invented by the german company SPHERON VR It is based on the SPHERON CAM (the little metal box), a camera that produces HDR (High Dynamic Range) images. Those capture the complete range of light information of the photographed surroundings. Now all the photographer has to do is take the picture. Without the car.
Back home, the real work starts: The car company supplies the post production with CAD data of the car. And combines it with yet another amazing technology: BRDF. Bi-directional Reflection Distribution Function, which calibrates a material´s reflection attributes.
Now the data is merged into the final picture. Of the car standing on the cliff at the edge of the gorge. Extensive image refining and color correction make the whole thing perfect.
The outcome is high class car photography. That looks very real.
In Germany, one company has taken this technology to perfection: ZERONE CGI.
But what´s next? Fashion photography without models…?
Aug 5, 2007 at 1:15 am
[...] Source and Read More: madvertising [...]
Aug 6, 2007 at 3:37 am
Wow! That’s really neat. The way that the public is getting increasingly familiar with 3D graphics, they may not notice anything different at all. It makes the car look flawless – perfect – something no car or person could achieve.
Aug 25, 2007 at 12:27 am
Fashion photography without models? You’re not going to believe it, but we have actually been working on that one! The problem is that the BRDF of hair is very hard to measure.
I am working for SpheronVR, by the way
Jul 13, 2008 at 8:43 am
You guys suck.
How about this: We create a computer program that does what you do–without YOU!
LOL
I’m actually ok with it as long as you can get to the point where you can program some how young models that look like humans but are only machines.
Smells like Matrix in here.
Aug 27, 2008 at 3:23 pm
I’m not so sure that they “invented” this process (though they probably designed their own workflow). This looks like the same idea as Paul Debevec’s work.
They also have a lot of CG cars in TV commercials.
2- Right now we’re not so good at making CG humans.
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Mar 28, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language
See you!
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And want to ask you: will you continue to post in this blog in future?
Sorry for my bad english:)
Thank you:)
Piter Kokoniz, from Latvia