Implementing the 4 Perspectives of Renaissance Painters

F. Kenton Musgrave, Digital Domain

Sonya Shannon, School of Visual Arts

The postscript text of our sketch submission. (39,563 bytes.)

Renaissance Painting vs. Computer Graphics

An illustration from Shannon's paper The Chrome Age: Dawn of Virtual Realitycontrasting the use of depth cues in Renaissance painting, and their absence in a computer rendering.

Aerial Perspective

Aerial perspective is the loss in contrast (atmospheric perspective) and shift in color (color perspective) with distance, that indicates scale on the order of kilometers in a rendering.

Aerial perspective in a synthetic landscape rendering.

The same landscape with atmospheric perspective only--no color perspective.

The same landscape with no atmospherics at all. Note how flat the image has become, all sense of scale and depth is lost.

An illustration of color perspective: There are two parallel, vertical planes, one black and one white, receding into infinity, plus an atmosphere. Note how the black plane turns blue with distance, and the white plane red. Note also that the atmosphere color must be a shade of gray to get both effects in the simple model.

Another example of the artistic use of aerial perspective.

The same image, without aerial perspective.

Planes of Focus

These images represent early experiments with planes of focus. This is very much work in progress.

Defocusing at 1 ray/pixel.

Defocusing at 16 rays/pixel.

The colors on the ground plane show the different "depth regions". They are 5 units apart and there are 5 regions. Both numbers are variable.

Landscape without planes of focus.

Defocusing applied to a landscape.