Topic: Tim's Vermeer
I watched Tim's Vermeer and really loved it and have done a little further research on it. Here is an overlay of the real painting of The Music Lesson with Tim Jenison's version.
Note that Tim didn't care about the exact placement of the figures and furniture (he was primarily interested in capturing the tonal shift in the shadows, something the human brain is very bad at and cameras--and Jan Vermeer--are very good at). But he did care about the perspective. I think he got the major aspect of perspective just right. Note how the overall frame of the room is really close (I actually cut off the left edge of the original a little, and its frame hid a little all the way around, or it would be nearly perfect.)
But the tiles and the window show that something is obviously off. Now Tim is a 3D artist and constructed the room in his computer first, so he presumably took note of the size and focal length of the virtual camera's lens. Yet, he never mentions the difference in the flooring, something you could actually eyeball against the real painting and get a closer match on your copy.
It's funny to say "I got a slight curvature to the harpsichord's seahorse motif just like Vermeer!" and yet be way off on the perspective of the floor tiles.
I suspect that adding the shaving mirror into the mix ruined any verisimilitude he could have had by making the 3D room, noting the size of the lens, and making a lens that size (however roughly). Can any 3D artists confirm what would have caused the difference?
For those who haven't watched the film, Tim constructed a room as identical as possible in size to Vermeer's studio and used a handmade lens to project the scene onto the back wall of the room. Then he put a concave shaving mirror against the wall and used a flat mirror to reflect that into his eye so he could see both the projection and the painting he was creating at the same time.
Last edited by Zarban (2015-07-12 23:19:16)
