Jill Harness
Amazingly Realistic Digital Artwork
by Jill Harness - April 5, 2010 - 8:08 AM

Other than the armor and a few stray hairs, this guy looks like someone you might see walking down the street. The thing is, he doesn’t actually exist.

This knight in shining armor is a digital creation by Israeli artist Max Kor. What is perhaps most fascinating is that this piece does not even show the most up-to-date effects that digital software is capable of. In fact, this picture was created all the way back in 2005.

If you thought Avatar looked realistic, just imagine what it would look like if the artists from this WebUrbanist post on digital artists had worked on the film.

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Comments (11)

  1. Honestly this photo and the others on the links of people still come off as being fake.

    I had heard somewhere that the problem with CGI is that the closer and closer you get to realism the harder it gets to fool the human eye. It’s even more challenging with people. We see people everyday and we know what people look like so we can tell when something is off. Take his hair for instance, it’s pretty obvious that it’s not real hair. But even if you could realistically render a person perfectly, you can’t animate them perfectly because there is too many details in human movement to possibly animate them all. But whether of not we notice all these details in real life we can tell when they are missing. It’s part of our social nature to observe body movement and language.

    I caught myself in Avatar often impressed with their effort but some effects still looked pretty fake. Maybe perfect realism needs a 600 million dollar movie?

    posted by Dan on 4-5-2010 at 9:38 am

  2. I still find myself taken aback by the “uncanny valley” in this photo. Yes he looks real but there is something off about him. My upbringing would say it was a soul . . . there is something missing in his eyes. A distance. When artists and designers can find that and put that in a photo, sculpture, or robot for that matter then I feel the uncanny valley will have been crossed . . .and I will be officially terrified.

    posted by Nathan on 4-5-2010 at 10:47 am

  3. While it doesn’t look like a living person in the slightest, it looks like a a wax sculpture or some sort of dummy. It appears tangible. In that it seems you could touch it, I think it’s quite realistic in that sense.

    posted by Jake LM on 4-5-2010 at 11:11 am

  4. Maybe it is me, but I thought it was real.

    posted by gus on 4-5-2010 at 11:59 am

  5. I’m with Gus; looks real to me. I think mental_floss might have made it too easy for the other commenters to jump on the ‘it looks fake!’ bandwagon. I see an idea for a quiz here! :-) Of course, I may just be mad at myself for being fooled.

    Heh… my reCaptcha: to renounce

    posted by Roger on 4-5-2010 at 12:15 pm

  6. I am in complete agreement with the previous comments. We still have not crossed the “uncanny valley”. Most of the figures look waxy and not like flesh. They are getting better at what they do. Another artist worth looking at is a Japanese artist who goes by the name of Yock. While his images may be a bit on the grotesque side of things, he does an amazing job of rendering, some really almost look real.

    posted by Tffany on 4-5-2010 at 12:15 pm

  7. @ Nathan – “My upbringing would say it was a soul . . . there is something missing in his eyes. A distance. When artists and designers can find that and put that in a photo, sculpture, or robot for that matter then I feel the uncanny valley will have been crossed . . .and I will be officially terrified.”

    I agree with you, but what terrifies me more than the crossing of the valley by artists is the increasing number of so-called REAL people that have the same eyes. Not the famed ‘thousand-yard-stare’, but the soulless look of a shark’s eyes as opposed to what you see in a dolphin’s. Dead eyes, mirroring dead minds…

    posted by Doc on 4-5-2010 at 2:41 pm

  8. That doesn’t look like someone I’d see walking down the street, but it DOES look like something I might see in a wax museum. Still in “the Uncanny Valley”.

    posted by Craig on 4-5-2010 at 3:37 pm

  9. Too much symmetry in the eyes, nose, and mouth. As an artist that is one of the first thing you learn, the human face has far too many asymmetrical aspects. They did it on things like wrinkles and hair coloring, but the eyes are nearly perfect mirror images of each other.

    posted by SaraP on 4-5-2010 at 4:40 pm

  10. @Dan
    Ah, except that it is not animated, it is a photograph, and a digital one at that. Even the photograph of a real person is nothing but various units (in this case, pixels) that vary in color and tone. It’s asinine to think that something can’t be built out of whole cloth that could approximate that.

    Artists have been taking advantage of our innate and fallible sense of visual perception for centuries! (Haberle is my favorite – he’s a fellow Nutmegger and his trampe l’oeils were just mesmerizing in grade school!)

    posted by Lynnie on 4-5-2010 at 4:46 pm

  11. To be fair, I’m not sure Avatar would have looked better if the artists in the article you linked to had worked on the film. I know quite a few of the artists at Weta, and they are incredible.

    posted by Logan on 4-6-2010 at 6:10 am

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