The intricate relationship between the eyes and the brain, often termed the eye-mind connection, reveals that vision is predominantly a cognitive process. This understanding has profound implications for fields such as design, where capturing and maintaining attention is paramount. This essay delves into the nuances of visual perception, the brain’s role in interpreting visual data, and how this knowledge can be applied to effective design strategies.
This cognitive aspect of vision is evident in phenomena such as optical illusions, where the brain interprets visual information in a way that contradicts physical reality. These illusions underscore that what we “see” is not merely a direct recording of the external world but a constructed experience shaped by cognitive processes.
Understanding the cognitive nature of vision is crucial for effective design. Designers must consider how the brain processes visual information to create compelling and engaging visuals. This involves several key principles:
In the Illusion of Sex, two faces are perceived as male and female.
However, both faces are actually versions of the same androgynous face.
One face was created by increasing the contrast of the androgynous face, while the other face was created by decreasing the contrast. The face with more contrast is perceived as female, while the face with less contrast is perceived as male. The Illusion of Sex demonstrates that contrast is an important cue for perceiving the sex of a face, with greater contrast appearing feminine, and lesser contrast appearing masculine.
Russell, R. (2009) A sex difference in facial pigmentation and its exaggeration by cosmetics. Perception, (38)1211-1219.
Hand drawn sketch | Models made in CC4 with ZBrush | Textures in Substance Painter | Paint over in Photoshop | Renders, Animation, VFX with AI. Each 5-8 hours spread over a couple days.
As I continue to explore the use of AI tools to enhance my 3D character creation process, I discover they can be incredibly useful during the previsualization phase to see what a character might ultimately look like in production. I selectively use AI to enhance and accelerate my creative process, not to replace it or use it as an end to end solution.
Ethan Roffler I recently had the honor of interviewing this VFX genius and gained great insight into what it takes to work in the entertainment industry. Keep in mind, these questions are coming from an artist’s perspective but can be applied to any creative individual looking for some wisdom from a professional. So grab a drink, sit back, and enjoy this fun and insightful conversation.
Ethan To start, I just wanted to say thank you so much for taking the time for this interview!
Daniele My pleasure. When I started my career I struggled to find help. Even people in the industry at the time were not that helpful. Because of that, I decided very early on that I was going to do exactly the opposite. I spend most of my weekends talking or helping students. ;)
Ethan That’s awesome! I have also come across the same struggle! Just a heads up, this will probably be the most informal interview you’ll ever have haha! Okay, so let’s start with a small introduction!
Divesh Naidoo: The video below was made with a live in-camera preview and auto-exposure matching, no camera solve, no HDRI capture and no manual compositing setup. Using the new Simulon phone app.
RGBW (RGB + White) LED strip uses a 4-in-1 LED chip made up of red, green, blue, and white.
RGBWW (RGB + White + Warm White) LED strip uses either a 5-in-1 LED chip with red, green, blue, white, and warm white for color mixing. The only difference between RGBW and RGBWW is the intensity of the white color. The term RGBCCT consists of RGB and CCT. CCT (Correlated Color Temperature) means that the color temperature of the led strip light can be adjusted to change between warm white and white. Thus, RGBWW strip light is another name of RGBCCT strip.
RGBCW is the acronym for Red, Green, Blue, Cold, and Warm. These 5-in-1 chips are used in supper bright smart LED lighting products
“a simple yet effective technique to estimate lighting in a single input image. Current techniques rely heavily on HDR panorama datasets to train neural networks to regress an input with limited field-of-view to a full environment map. However, these approaches often struggle with real-world, uncontrolled settings due to the limited diversity and size of their datasets. To address this problem, we leverage diffusion models trained on billions of standard images to render a chrome ball into the input image. Despite its simplicity, this task remains challenging: the diffusion models often insert incorrect or inconsistent objects and cannot readily generate images in HDR format. Our research uncovers a surprising relationship between the appearance of chrome balls and the initial diffusion noise map, which we utilize to consistently generate high-quality chrome balls. We further fine-tune an LDR difusion model (Stable Diffusion XL) with LoRA, enabling it to perform exposure bracketing for HDR light estimation. Our method produces convincing light estimates across diverse settings and demonstrates superior generalization to in-the-wild scenarios.”
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