Deceptively real images of nature have always fascinated and inspired creative people. The boundaries between rendering and reality are infinitesimally small - and do not stop at people.
In the distant past, I think it was the Pleistocene, the render party suddenly started. Without any circuit board or electricity from the socket, the eternal competition between nature and man was documented on the soot-blackened cave walls, bioprocessor-controlled, with Elasto stick figures.
When I myself, in a Planck-era moment seen in the history of the earth, saw the light of day, the first hormone-controlled steps towards a differentiated representation of the environment were not far away. With a 4B pencil and wood-containing paper, the drawing path, in accordance with the genetic disposition, ran in the direction of stick figures. However, with a gender-specific imprint in the seventies - either as a technoid-dominated, spoiled car dream with a non-ASU-compatible Giganto-Akrapovic exhaust tailpipe or as a weapon-rigid, HMS dreadnought-like battleship in a brain-damaged permanent combat mode.
Sheet after sheet, these ritualized scenarios were perfected and destroyed in a mania for aggression, to the delight of the garbage incinerators. As I think I know today, I was already rendering testosterone back then.
Kings of the Marker Group
That society currently equates "rendering" with the principles of an algorithmically controlled computer world merely shows that we have forgotten that pencil and chalk are also capable of representing reflections, light, shadow, transparency and materiality.
In the eighties, design studios were still populated by these humanoid rendering elites. There was the Marker faction, for example, who were revered in the layout floors like Bob Ross druids. Felt-tip pens with an impractical glass bottle tank - extremely unwieldy and smelly - were able to visualize every idea of a creative, no matter how abstruse it might be.
Without these Magic Marker pens: no presentation, no order, no discussion. As an insignia of the profession, these drawing tools, arranged to form a decorative colour gradient and lined up in grid blocks, resided on the table of the felt-tip pen-Dürer.
Only the rare Twin-Tip-Pantone markers were hidden under the table in a Colombo-Bieffeplast plastic box type Bobby b44. In short: The gentlemen (I certainly did not meet any woman who would have marked) were the unassailable kings and on top of that, free and legal, they were permanently high by inhaling the toluene-pregnated marker vapours.
Short life for airbrushers
Then there was a mysterious air number, a deus ex machina of an analogously rendered hyper-reality - the airbrushers. Here, too, the priceless piled up. For example, miniature spray guns by Devilbiss, with names that would have honored a private jet, like "Aerograph super 63", with a milled ball tank and double action levers.
These were used to create images and retouching as if they were dealing with a transmutation of colour pigments banned from science; quietly running miniature compressors and masking films under the table.
These seemingly unassailable, sacred specialist worlds of analog rendering have been lost in the sea of raytracing and radiosity possibilities without a sound and can now be purchased at discount prices in the craft corner of the hardware store around the corner. As if the house altar existed as a plastic construction kit with operating instructions - somehow sad.
Exponential increase of perfection
This should not sound like lamenting over lost specialist terrain. I was neither one of the Magic Marker swingers nor one of the Aerograph 63 disciples. However, the exponential increase of perfection in rendering is a fact that is not without social consequences - positive as well as negative.
At the interface of the industrial revolution, conflict sociologist Georg Simmel has done some thinking ahead that can be applied to virtual production, including rendering. He writes: "If there were two theories, the one that allowed better access to the real would ultimately survive".
Transposed into rendering
In real estate marketing, the real thing is sometimes communicated in this way: "Photo-realistic rendering and animation translate factual planning material into emotional images and thus enable identification. A strange congruence of image and reality creeps into the perception of modern architecture, for example.
In rendering, life models appear so lifelike that they become reality as if they were taken for granted. This is also evident in Frankfurt's Europaviertel, once the largest inner-city construction site in Germany. When walking through a parade street of modern residential worlds, which is characterized by a monotony of perforated facades and has an almost totalitarian feel to it, it is sometimes unclear whether one is walking through an over-dimensional rendering or reality.
"Straße des 15. Septembers" would be a great name for this Frankfurt miniature street of 17 June, because the investment bank Lehman Brothers had also rendered similarly holey prosperity models into fantasy financial models.
Human equivalents
But the perfection of computer-aided architectural fantasies does not stop at people either. Gone are the days when hand-painted Preisser/Mertens figures populated architectural models and caused irritation with nudist and pole-dance series. Instead, an army of commercially available renderpeople, all of them streamline existences.
Among others a Bugaboo runner (three-wheeled) pushing mother (specification: Geometry 100k & 30k polycount, photobased high-res 8k colormap), also included, with blue tie, trousers and dark-skinned: the telephoning businessman. For the Leisure-Day faction there is one of these perfectly trained tanned sandal wearers with short pants and three-day beard.
Real world falls off
I immediately imagine a Bully T1 plus surfboard made of Chinese bluebell tree in the clinically clean, natural stone-lined underground car park. These virtual model building archetypes represent a clean metropolitan living community that hardly accepts any flaws in the perfectionist rendering.
Here in Frankfurt alone, I am standing with both feet in reality - relaxing: the limping old greyhaired dachshund is just urinating against the brown sandstone façade, leaving a disturbing, stinking stain...
A question of processor power
Andrea Roedig recently stated in the Neue Züricher Zeitung "Hey, I'm in the rendering!" and she is right. Unintentionally, the Renaissance is knocking on the door of many of the architectures currently being drawn. In reality, trees are lowered and selected so that the trunks disappear into the ground without a trace. Here the real tree must follow the virtual version. Whether we will see roots in the future could therefore quickly become a question of processor performance.
Are we poor Mhz-driven gnomes perhaps no longer in post-postmodernism, but already in the renaissance? The all-encompassing will to achieve perfectionist digital rendering could be a first indication of this. In the 15th century, hyper-realism grandmasters like Giotto were already carried on hands. Today it is no longer artists who are revered, but luminous xk Fire Pro video cards, responsible for visual masturbation.
Bad for the genius, because the formally oriented citation fetishism of postmodernism has given way to a hipster-full-frustration about the fact that everything has already been there and that in a global comparison one loses the possibility of becoming recognizable as an individual.
Possible alternative concept
Here, too, the Renaissance demonstrates that affirmation is not a creative dioxin, but also an antidote to forgetting. In my view, the omnipotence of ancient knowledge felt at the end of the 14th century is to be equated with the omniscience of a global data network.
It is important to use this positively in terms of design and not to sacrifice it to the compulsively inhibited search for originality. In a humanly self-conscious, computer-aided combinatorics of the existing, there could be a counter-draft to the algorithmic incapacitation of creativity in favour of purely financial performance orientation.
I don't want to leave unmentioned the fact that mistakes can easily creep in. The user profiles, as consumer renderings of all our web existences, are actually asocial rendering excesses. They stamp us more and more accurately as virtual narcissists, for whom their profile is always just an opportunistic mirror.
Natural renderings as extremes
The devices of this reflection have long since been part of our beautiful new rendered Pokemon-GO reality and favour the monadic self-runner with a 45 degree tilted head position and wireless sound to the tympanic cavity in the head. And as always - in keeping with the omnipresent maximisation idea - there's something else: the extreme natural renderings.
Tom Leppard, for example, who with extended incisors, 98 percent body leopard skin tattoo and a changed name, put one of the perfectionist big cat renderings on his own legs.
Even more extreme: the highly independent beauty ideal of the telephone cost and wine bill queen Jocelyn Wildenstein. An aesthetic "La divina commedia rendering", which approaches the divine processor core genderless, only to fail tragically, rendergender!
Deceptively real images of nature have always fascinated and inspired creative people. The boundaries between rendering and reality are infinitesimally small - and do not stop at people.
In the distant past, I think it was the Pleistocene, the render party suddenly started. Without any circuit board or electricity from the socket, the eternal competition between nature and man was documented on the soot-blackened cave walls, bioprocessor-controlled, with Elasto stick figures.
When I myself, in a Planck-era moment seen in the history of the earth, saw the light of day, the first hormone-controlled steps towards a differentiated representation of the environment were not far away. With a 4B pencil and wood-containing paper, the drawing path, in accordance with the genetic disposition, ran in the direction of stick figures. However, with a gender-specific imprint in the seventies - either as a technoid-dominated, spoiled car dream with a non-ASU-compatible Giganto-Akrapovic exhaust tailpipe or as a weapon-rigid, HMS dreadnought-like battleship in a brain-damaged permanent combat mode.
Sheet after sheet, these ritualized scenarios were perfected and destroyed in a mania for aggression, to the delight of the garbage incinerators. As I think I know today, I was already rendering testosterone back then.
Kings of the Marker Group
That society currently equates "rendering" with the principles of an algorithmically controlled computer world merely shows that we have forgotten that pencil and chalk are also capable of representing reflections, light, shadow, transparency and materiality.
In the eighties, design studios were still populated by these humanoid rendering elites. There was the Marker faction, for example, who were revered in the layout floors like Bob Ross druids. Felt-tip pens with an impractical glass bottle tank - extremely unwieldy and smelly - were able to visualize every idea of a creative, no matter how abstruse it might be.
Without these Magic Marker pens: no presentation, no order, no discussion. As an insignia of the profession, these drawing tools, arranged to form a decorative colour gradient and lined up in grid blocks, resided on the table of the felt-tip pen-Dürer.
Only the rare Twin-Tip-Pantone markers were hidden under the table in a Colombo-Bieffeplast plastic box type Bobby b44. In short: The gentlemen (I certainly did not meet any woman who would have marked) were the unassailable kings and on top of that, free and legal, they were permanently high by inhaling the toluene-pregnated marker vapours.
Short life for airbrushers
Then there was a mysterious air number, a deus ex machina of an analogously rendered hyper-reality - the airbrushers. Here, too, the priceless piled up. For example, miniature spray guns by Devilbiss, with names that would have honored a private jet, like "Aerograph super 63", with a milled ball tank and double action levers.
These were used to create images and retouching as if they were dealing with a transmutation of colour pigments banned from science; quietly running miniature compressors and masking films under the table.
These seemingly unassailable, sacred specialist worlds of analog rendering have been lost in the sea of raytracing and radiosity possibilities without a sound and can now be purchased at discount prices in the craft corner of the hardware store around the corner. As if the house altar existed as a plastic construction kit with operating instructions - somehow sad.
Exponential increase of perfection
This should not sound like lamenting over lost specialist terrain. I was neither one of the Magic Marker swingers nor one of the Aerograph 63 disciples. However, the exponential increase of perfection in rendering is a fact that is not without social consequences - positive as well as negative.
At the interface of the industrial revolution, conflict sociologist Georg Simmel has done some thinking ahead that can be applied to virtual production, including rendering. He writes: "If there were two theories, the one that allowed better access to the real would ultimately survive".
Transposed into rendering
In real estate marketing, the real thing is sometimes communicated in this way: "Photo-realistic rendering and animation translate factual planning material into emotional images and thus enable identification. A strange congruence of image and reality creeps into the perception of modern architecture, for example.
In rendering, life models appear so lifelike that they become reality as if they were taken for granted. This is also evident in Frankfurt's Europaviertel, once the largest inner-city construction site in Germany. When walking through a parade street of modern residential worlds, which is characterized by a monotony of perforated facades and has an almost totalitarian feel to it, it is sometimes unclear whether one is walking through an over-dimensional rendering or reality.
"Straße des 15. Septembers" would be a great name for this Frankfurt miniature street of 17 June, because the investment bank Lehman Brothers had also rendered similarly holey prosperity models into fantasy financial models.
Human equivalents
But the perfection of computer-aided architectural fantasies does not stop at people either. Gone are the days when hand-painted Preisser/Mertens figures populated architectural models and caused irritation with nudist and pole-dance series. Instead, an army of commercially available renderpeople, all of them streamline existences.
Among others a Bugaboo runner (three-wheeled) pushing mother (specification: Geometry 100k & 30k polycount, photobased high-res 8k colormap), also included, with blue tie, trousers and dark-skinned: the telephoning businessman. For the Leisure-Day faction there is one of these perfectly trained tanned sandal wearers with short pants and three-day beard.
Real world falls off
I immediately imagine a Bully T1 plus surfboard made of Chinese bluebell tree in the clinically clean, natural stone-lined underground car park. These virtual model building archetypes represent a clean metropolitan living community that hardly accepts any flaws in the perfectionist rendering.
Here in Frankfurt alone, I am standing with both feet in reality - relaxing: the limping old greyhaired dachshund is just urinating against the brown sandstone façade, leaving a disturbing, stinking stain...
A question of processor power
Andrea Roedig recently stated in the Neue Züricher Zeitung "Hey, I'm in the rendering!" and she is right. Unintentionally, the Renaissance is knocking on the door of many of the architectures currently being drawn. In reality, trees are lowered and selected so that the trunks disappear into the ground without a trace. Here the real tree must follow the virtual version. Whether we will see roots in the future could therefore quickly become a question of processor performance.
Are we poor Mhz-driven gnomes perhaps no longer in post-postmodernism, but already in the renaissance? The all-encompassing will to achieve perfectionist digital rendering could be a first indication of this. In the 15th century, hyper-realism grandmasters like Giotto were already carried on hands. Today it is no longer artists who are revered, but luminous xk Fire Pro video cards, responsible for visual masturbation.
Bad for the genius, because the formally oriented citation fetishism of postmodernism has given way to a hipster-full-frustration about the fact that everything has already been there and that in a global comparison one loses the possibility of becoming recognizable as an individual.
Possible alternative concept
Here, too, the Renaissance demonstrates that affirmation is not a creative dioxin, but also an antidote to forgetting. In my view, the omnipotence of ancient knowledge felt at the end of the 14th century is to be equated with the omniscience of a global data network.
It is important to use this positively in terms of design and not to sacrifice it to the compulsively inhibited search for originality. In a humanly self-conscious, computer-aided combinatorics of the existing, there could be a counter-draft to the algorithmic incapacitation of creativity in favour of purely financial performance orientation.
I don't want to leave unmentioned the fact that mistakes can easily creep in. The user profiles, as consumer renderings of all our web existences, are actually asocial rendering excesses. They stamp us more and more accurately as virtual narcissists, for whom their profile is always just an opportunistic mirror.
Natural renderings as extremes
The devices of this reflection have long since been part of our beautiful new rendered Pokemon-GO reality and favour the monadic self-runner with a 45 degree tilted head position and wireless sound to the tympanic cavity in the head. And as always - in keeping with the omnipresent maximisation idea - there's something else: the extreme natural renderings.
Tom Leppard, for example, who with extended incisors, 98 percent body leopard skin tattoo and a changed name, put one of the perfectionist big cat renderings on his own legs.
Even more extreme: the highly independent beauty ideal of the telephone cost and wine bill queen Jocelyn Wildenstein. An aesthetic "La divina commedia rendering", which approaches the divine processor core genderless, only to fail tragically, rendergender!