Make Your Renders Unnecessarily Complicated…

July 1, 2023 3:23 PM

…by modeling a film camera in Blender to capture images in Blender. In excruciating detail. (SLYT)

Shamelessly ganked from John Siracusa's Mastodon feed.

posted by adamrice (12 comments total)

Aw, man, I saw this go by on masto a while back and I thought to myself "that sounds great but man I don't have the patience for it". I didn't realize how concise or how shitposty the actual video was. That was a delightful five minutes.
posted by cortex at 3:32 PM on July 1, 2023 [7 favorites]

Amazing. I suppose the next step is replacing the film layers with a simulated digital sensor chip.
posted by meinvt at 3:36 PM on July 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

Surprised he didn't render a rabbit hole to go down.
posted by rikschell at 4:32 PM on July 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yo dawg?
posted by Sing Or Swim at 4:32 PM on July 1, 2023 [6 favorites]

Wow.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:44 PM on July 1, 2023

Vaguely related, Filmulator "develops" raw files out of your camera by simulating film development.
posted by BungaDunga at 5:36 PM on July 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

Very interesting, but stupid.
(shoulda gone with a Tessar instead of a Cooke Triplet)
posted by scruss at 5:51 PM on July 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

I always sort of wondered if the physics engines of the 3D programs could sim real world light, did thing it was as easy as "take a few day to write a lens shader" .... yes mind totally blown.
posted by sammyo at 10:30 PM on July 1, 2023

Wow indeed. As someone who works daily with digital images both from digital cameras and from film, this is some sort of speedrun of the development of cameras and imaging... inside a much more advanced imaging machine.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 10:57 PM on July 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm impressed!
Not by modeling the camera optics etc.
I'm impressed that anyone could do that in blender as my experience in blender has traditionally been, "I'd like to try rendering this in Blender. Myabe they've worked the bugs out." Install Blender. Blender crashes within a few minutes while trying to do something simple. Uninstall Blender.
posted by plinth at 9:49 AM on July 2, 2023 [3 favorites]

Sure, Jan.
posted by waving at 5:44 PM on July 2, 2023

This is so cool. I was hoping for a camera flythough of the camera at the end. And now I want to see the end result of a Camera Caterpillar render.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 5:53 AM on July 3, 2023