Real or not?

This week seminar was about "Realism".

We spoke about different aspects of it, if people accept it and not.
Realism is an interpretation / transformation of what we see.

It is very hard to do something very realistic for me as a 3D animator. One of the main things I have to consider is photo realism which is next to impossible to achieve at the moment, although I'm not saying its not possible as I saw examples of it personally. Like recreation of photography in 3D.  But some think that even photography is not real, which is debatable, as it captures our every day life, moments of our life. For about past hundred years people doing photography as it is one of the most realistic things we can do.
By looking at the photo we see colours, shape and depth that convince us of it's realism, but at the same time it lack's movement that can push it forward.

But even paintings can be very realistic, we were shown one painting in the seminar that looked just like a photo, that gave an impression to our eye's that it is real when it is clearly not.



Some people can't or don't want to see the line between the real world and the imaginary world, in example World of Warcraft. It has more than 12 million of players who play it on a day to day basis, as it has became part of their life. People have friends in that game, they socialize with, co-operate, share laugh moments, betrayals and so on... Games like that change the reality for these people although it was created by others. However looking at that game it has no photo realism but it has its mood and theme that gives an impression of realism and it works.

As an animator I personally think that it is not necessary to create something that will make our eyes think it's real, there is other ways for it such as animation and expressions characters should have.