An excellent book on this topic is by Bill Fleming called 3D Photorealism toolkit. He is an amazing 3d artist. His stuff is very 'real' looking. I know he has a website (but I will have to hunt around for it) that is on a subscriber basis.

The biggest problem that 3D artists have is making everything too shiny. I have seen oranges and paper bags look like they are made of glass rather than the organic matter that these objects are normally made of. Real life is not that shiny. So one thing that can be done in photoshop is to dirty up the image to make it look more realistic. But then again, you are probably best off using more appropriate lighting and image maps to begin with.

Super Realists dont really try to portray life as it is. They try to show more than what is actually there. Ken Danby is a super realist and he spends considerable time on every detail in the painting. Every raindrop on a rain jacket is painted as if viewing it close up. Even the highlights and reflections on the raindrop will be portrayed. It takes incredibly skill and observation to do this kind of stuff. A photograph is not like this. And nor is real life like this. When you are viewing something, you generally focus in on a certain area and give that more depth and detail. Other areas are less in focus and have less detail. Where as the Super Realists see absolutely every detail on everything. The italian rennaisance painters as such, were not really 'super realists'. They actually tried to use techiques to focus the viewers attention on areas of the painting like charascurro (forgive the bad spelling) where parts of the image faded off into the shadows.

Anyway, best of luck and I will try to find Bill Flemings website for you.

Beth

PS: One of the sites is

http://www.komodostudio.com

I cant find the tutorial one

[This message was edited by Beth Mohler on January 25, 2001 at 04:22 PM.]