As an artist, I skew very heavily towards cartoons. As in that is what I know how to make. But what if an artist with no experience in photorealism (in any medium) decided they wanted to make something that absolutely requires photorealism in order to work? Heck, even if they did have the know-how, small productions might not have the resources to pull it off. The main thing photorealism demands, as I understand it, is detail. Lots of detail. Remember, we’re not simply talking about making art feel realistic, we need it to look near-indistinguishable from real life. That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you can cheat at. But from what I’ve seen, the internet has found a way.
There’s good odds you’ve seen this thumbnail. This is the viral video: The Backrooms (Found Footage), and the remarkable thing about it is that it was made by a highschooler, and is 100% CG. In my experience, this information is a bit shocking to people, because if you watch the video, it truly does look perfectly real.
I think a lot of that comes from the incredible sound design. Youtuber Kane Pixels, the film’s creator has always had a knack for immersive sound design (you can watch his earlier work for proof of that). And the animation on the various monsters is probably the film’s weakest link. However, the environment, The Backrooms themselves, look so real I’ve seen people fully not believe me when I tell them it was all made in a computer. (While Kane was on Zoom classes, no less.)
The key here is partly the fact that rectangular hallways are a very easy thing to create in a computer, but to make them look this real, Kane makes use of a trick that’s becoming more and more popular with similar kinds of online content. Implied detail.
It all comes from the VHS distortion effect. When you start the film, you see a group of kids in the 90s using a simple camcorder to record home movies. The signature VHS distortion is present for the entire film, and all of its sequels. It’s a thing we in the real world are all too familiar with, and thus something we accept. The level of detail you’d get from anything run through enough VHS tapes is going to be a lot lower than the crisp HD footage we’re used to today. So even a non-photorealistic CG environment will still feel realistic because that VHS distortion has implied more detail exists.
The Backrooms is part of a much larger trend of online horror content called Analog Horror, and from what I’ve seen, just about every single one of these makes use of similar aesthetics. They have to. Because those limits are what allow indie creators to depict stories and concepts with a massive scope. The Backrooms are a near-infinite network of empty hallways and office blocks. Making people really feel that sense of scale would otherwise be impossible.
This is all well and good for Analog Horror, since a big part of the genre is the fact that it takes place in the past. But what if you’re me and you’re working on a story that instead takes place in the near-future.
One of the projects I’ve been developing is a hard-scifi space horror. I don’t want to reveal too much about the story yet, but it’s the kind of thing that would benefit from being as realistic as I can make it.
One of the ways I thought I could pull it off was to never actually show human beings. Making a photorealistic person is something I might never be able to do; certainly not on my own. (I could maybe film people, but that would introduce so many more difficulties and scale to the production) Thing is, modern and near-future spacecraft are made mostly of simple shapes. Spheres, cylinders, cones, and not much more than that. My idea is that you’d hear people talk through coms chatter and only see what cameras mounted outside the spacecraft can see.
Horror often comes most from the things you don’t see, so I think this method would only enhance the horror of things. Especially since it means you’ll only ever see the ships from really up close, or really far away. A good way to emphasize just how huge space truly is.
So a few months back, I got to work testing out if I would really be able to do this. I decided to make a model of the Apollo Command Module:
It seemed like a good test, since the basic design of it is very visually simple. I even found this incredibly helpful diagram to base the model off of:
I started building the basic shapes, and then quite quickly hit a wall.
Most of the module’s details are small surface features. In theory you can model every single one of them, but that’s inefficient and my computer would surely die. What you want to do for something like this is use a mix of image textures and normal maps. But I couldn’t find any textures to use for this, and good lord did I not know how to make them myself.
To be honest, I still don’t know how to do that. I’m starting to think the way it’s done is through photorealistic painting, and I have never managed to crack even regular painting, let alone something like that. My first post on here was talking about how much I don’t like working with details. This was a complete deal-breaker for me.
But recently, I went back to the idea of implied detail. Could I really justify lowering the footage quality enough to hide the lack of details? And how low can I justify making it?
Well. It turns out with the premise of this story, I can justify it being basically as low as I want! All I’ll say is that the characters are in such dire straights they can’t even afford to waste resources like digital storage space, so all their footage has to be compressed as heck.
This time, my model was meant not to accurately reflect the details of the real command module, but to simply suggest them. Building a scene was easy enough since getting accurate textures of planets has been made very easy thanks to NASA. And after that I just needed to mess with the render result to make it look artfully worse.
The result was this:
We’re not quite there, but this did look promising. With some materials and simple textures, it should be good to go.
Under any other circumstances, I would not have called this model finished, but I was really banking on that implied detail making it work.
And sure enough, it did!
I’m incredibly happy with how these turned out. I was seriously not sure if I’d be able to make this project work by any means, and now it seems shockingly doable. Sometimes art is the art of doing as little art as possible.