Search results

I've edited my post.

The original "flyby" video isn't exactly what you'd call sharp though, aside from the reflections. I can also re-render this one without the artificial blur added at the end, if you want to see how much detail you can resolve in both planes. edit: added the non-blurred version.

Yes it depends on a bunch of stuff - how big's the screen he filmed it off, how bright was it, how fast is the lens, how big is the sensor etc. A phone camera probably isn't the best choice to replicate it. When the scratches were in focus, the scene was definitely slightly out of focus, but I...

Here's my lunchtime attempt at filming the 3D animation off screen, compressed down to appropriately poor quality. The scratches on the plastic wouldn't stay in focus unfortunately, as my phone kept wanting to auto-focus on the screen. But I think it reconstructs the main elements of the...

The animation to emulate the movement in the flyby video is extremely simple, these are the X and Y location curves I ended up with: Just three keyframes with curves interpolating the points (I did also tweak the saucer's tilt with another, even simpler, curve). I think the reason that the...

I actually started out with a (slightly modified) Le Creuset lid at first — from a 3d stock model website. But it's actually very easy to model a round object, you just have to draw half of its cross section in a join-the-dots fashion, and then use the "spin" operator to turn it into a solid...

On Saturday afternoon I learned enough Blender to figure out how how to make this with some footage I found on YouTube I'll work on the animation next to make it more like the original, then I'll render a longer clip. Degrading the quality by overcompressing the video will also help to fuzz...

I suppose it would depend on focal length (and sensor size), distance from the reflective surface etc. You might need very little tilt of the camera. I just took this photo with an iPhone, the reflection is deflected off center but the lens still looks very round. Here's a square crop...

You can increase the size of the reflection by either bringing the camera closer, or by using a longer focal length. I played around with both to create those renders. But in physical situation I'm trying to simulate, it's not clear to me whether the light source is on the same side of the...

Yes, or the rings could be bevelled rather than flat, so the upper right would be angled toward the light and the lower left angled away. Too many unknowns there. I think the impossible camera angle is sufficient proof of fakery, though.

I'm only concerned here with the way the light is falling onto the silvery ring we can see reflected. It looks like more light is hitting the top-right of it compared to the bottom-left, which is more consistent with a small light source just out of frame than it is with the constant intensity...

Sorry Ravi, I wasn't very clear — I thought you were going to have a piece of glass/plastic in front of the camera so we would see its reflection!

I think so, yes - that's what gives the glare around the scratches and makes the whole thing feel like a cohesive scene. I might also try to model a silver lens ring in Blender and simulate different lighting conditions. One potential issue is that we don't know if the silvery ring is flat or...

I'm not sure about this part, as being above the clouds on a plane during the day ought to lead to very bright sunny lighting. And the counter argument would be that the outside scene is very blurry anyway, so we're not compelled to find a way for both close up and distant objects to be...

To get the field of view matched up, it came out at 70mm. I spent a while trying to work out camera it could have been shot with, and found that video functionality hadn't been added to Canon's or Nikon's DSLR range at the time of the video's first upload, April 2008. The 5D MkII and D90 only...

Another way to test it would be take stills from the video and try fitting a perfect circle to the lens's reflection with Photoshop. From a quick test, I think the reflection in the frame above is slightly ellipsoid, shorter on the X axis compared to the Y. But here's the thing — If you import...

I've been thinking a bit about the optics of this video. It's quite noticeable that during the part where the plane's wing is visible, the reflected ring of the camera lens is offset to the left of the shot: Since the inner plastic window of an airline is parallel to the fuselage of the...

This part here looks especially unlike a balloon or hanging object — the rotation is arrested very abruptly. I'm not sure why Occam's razor doesn't just bring us to CGI by default anyway — we've seen just recently how extreme shaky-cam can be used to "sell" CGI elements composited into a...

And yet applying the same technique to these clips does not result in any object in the scene erractically sliding around the frame coincident with the focal length change. Source: https://streamable.com/zjy4mx

This is probably the frame with the biggest discrepancy, frames 1995/1996 from the video.