108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring

2025-05-010:22476138hirox-europe.com

Girl with a Pearl Earring

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  • By cgriswald 2025-05-013:1514 reply

    When viewing this I was captivated by the girl's lips. In the full view, the bottom lip looks not just full and moist, but slightly wet. Zooming in, it's a bit of a muddy mess with only a splash of white giving definition to the (anatomical) left of the girl's mouth.

    In my current incarnation I'm a fledgling novelist and one of the things I've learned is to trust the audience to 'fill in the gaps'. Although this is probably obvious already to many, the parallel between that and the way that we sort of do that when we look at paintings suddenly hit me.

    • By roughly 2025-05-014:178 reply

      If you get a chance to see some of the impressionists in person, they’re kind of mind blowing for exactly the same reason - you’re looking at a scene of a ship in a storm and seeing all kinds of nuance, and then you get closer and realize it’s all your brain filling in the blanks.

      From a literary angle - two books I’ve read that are absolute master classes in this are Italio Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and “This Is How You Lose the Time War” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - both do an incredible job of putting you in a series of vivid, fantastical places within a paragraph or two of exposition.

      • By ahoog42 2025-05-0116:33

        Jonathan Sawday’s 2023 book “Blanks, Print, Space, and Void in English Renaissance Literature: An Archaeology of Absence.” [1] explores this phenomenon as well across multiple mediums.

        It also won the Modern Language Association's top award — the James Russell Lowell Prize for the most outstanding book published in 2023.

        [1] https://academic.oup.com/book/46695

      • By dvt 2025-05-018:153 reply

        > Italio Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”

        So wild seeing this referenced here, it's a pretty obscure book (of poetry nonetheless), and one my absolute favorites. Cheers to having great taste :)

        PS: Small nit: it's "Italo," not "Italio."

      • By loxias 2025-05-0116:28

        > "This Is How You Lose the Time War"

        No other book captured the feelings of being 20-something and flirting like reading this. Reading it felt like being right back there again, with all the excitement and anxiety. Highly recommended to anyone.

        Unsure how it connects to the notion of a brain filling in the blanks. I thought it was quite "filled in", but maybe my brain did it, and therefore I'm making your point for you :)

      • By pbronez 2025-05-0112:29

        “This is How You Lose the Time War” is brilliant. Highly recommend the audio book.

      • By TylerE 2025-05-018:382 reply

        Absolutely. I was at the Virginia Museum of Art where they have several Monets and 3 Van Goghs. They also let you get quite close to them… less than a foot away in some cases. The amount of texture is incredible. (What also struck me in person, though I had read about it previously, is how tiny almost all Van Goghs are. Barely more than postcard size in some cases.

        • By hilbert42 2025-05-0122:00

          "They also let you get quite close to them… less than a foot away in some cases."

          That happened to me some years ago in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, two remarkable pictures particularly come to mind Vermeer's The Milkmaid and a Rembrandt self portrait.

          The Milkmaid is comparatively small painting (~18×16" according to Wiki) and I was not only able to view it up incredibly close and in detail but also it was a quiet time for visitors and I had the painting all to myself. I stared at it for minutes in a strange state of amazement brought on by not only how wonderful this Vermeer masterpiece was and that I was looking at it for real and it wasn't a dream but also that I could get so close and do so for so long given the work is worth many, many millions, it's effectively priceless. My experience was even more remarkable given that I was visiting the museum just after Rembrandt's The Night Watch had been repaired, restored and put back on display after a maniac had slashed it with a knife.

          The other painting was a Rembrandt self portrait, it was in an alcove all on its own. Again, I had this truly remarkable painting all to myself to view close up. It was an incredible experience, with Rembrandt's eyes staring directly at me it felt as if he was talking to me. It shocked me that a painting that is over 350 years old and painted by someone many generations removed from today could generate such a large emotional response in me.

          I consider that particular visit to the Rijksmuseum (I've been there a number of times) as one of the most memorable experiences of my life and I consider it a great privilege that the museum provided me the opportunity to see these remarkable works up close and in depth.

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Milkmaid_(Vermeer)

        • By astr0n0m3r 2025-05-0112:162 reply

          You should probably fact check your statement about the size of Van Gogh paintings. Easily disproved.

          • By TylerE 2025-05-0120:12

            Several of the paintings at the VMA are less than 10 inches in their lingerie dimension.

            Perhaps postcard sized was slight hyperbole, but not by much. All 3 would have been in the bottom 5 of the museum size wise, and it’s a huge museum.

          • By wizzwizz4 2025-05-0113:51

            They're shown on big walls, so I totally get how they can seem small.

      • By dmd 2025-05-0112:321 reply

        If anyone's in Minneapolis, see this theater production of Invisible Cities: https://www.southerntheater.org/shows/invisible-cities-a-toy... - it's fantastic.

      • By nandomrumber 2025-05-017:21

        Who’s that fella what did that TV show where he paints portraits of his famous guests.

      • By kylebenzle 2025-05-015:558 reply

        I read a lot of sci-fi and because it's come up in recommendations I've tried two or three times to read that book, "This Is How You Lose the Time War".

        The popularity of that book along with stuff like N.K. Jemisin winning "Best SciFi book" of the year 3 years in a row prove more than ever that the vast majority of people simply don't have taste in the sense they can not decide if they actually like something or not they can only like what other people like.

        That book was objectively bad but it keeps showing up on the top of best sci-fi book lists for some reason and so a lot of people keep (mistakingly) thinking they liked it.

        • By roughly 2025-05-016:171 reply

          > objectively bad

          Well that settles that, then.

          • By kylebenzle 2025-05-0212:03

            The new reality for a lot of young people I find is that there is no objective reality. Its a dangerous and stupid idea but there is still an objective reality, even if you want to ignore it.

        • By 542354234235 2025-05-0118:50

          Try to learn to be less self-centered. Something isn’t objectively bad because you don’t like it. People aren’t tricked into liking something just because you don’t like it. People’s tastes vary and different people like different writing styles. Try something like “I think the books are very poorly written and I just cannot understand how they continue to be so popular. Seriously, what is the appeal?” Not only are you presenting your viewpoint, not as some arbiter of truth, but you are inviting discussion and an opportunity to learn something you don’t currently know i.e. what people enjoy about those books that makes them popular.

        • By pbronez 2025-05-0112:35

          Time War is NOT hard Sci-Fi. It’s a wartime romance that uses divergent technical evolution to create cultural distance and time travel to engineer social collisions.

          The combination is fantastically human.

        • By fish_phrenology 2025-05-016:072 reply

          It took a bit but by the end it had grown on me. I agree it's technically not great but maybe I'm just used to that from reading sci-fi, most of which feels technically bad. That said my reaction to the first quarter was mostly "uhh?". Big disagree on N.K. Jemisin though, I enjoyed reading those. Books 2 and 3 of the three body problem series feel like what you're describing to me. Never got why those were popular, the first one had the interesting cultural revolution flashback element but the sequels did almost nothing for me.

          Filling-in-the-gaps-books wise, it's hard to do better than Earthsea in my mind. They're quite short books, yet I found myself far more engrossed in the world and the goings-on than some thousand page Sanderson tomb I snoozed through.

          • By pests 2025-05-016:45

            > interesting cultural revolution flashback element

            Interestingly this section either appeared in the beginning or somewhere in the middle depending on the translation/version (I forget how the distinction was made) due to it being so different from the rest of the book.

            It was in the beginning when I read it years ago and I think it took a bit for its context to make sense but I also read many lost interest during it.

            I enjoyed all the books. (spoilers incoming) I actually enjoyed the love story elements, how a star given to someone would play such an important role later. How he survived in the end and communicated the three fairy tales, and enjoyed each in turn. I've never seen a story span such a vast amount of time nor remember one that took us literally to the end.

          • By eru 2025-05-017:42

            I already felt pretty annoyed with the first Three Body Problem book.

            But a big part of the problem is that after looking into space colonisation etc a bit, the aliens in most alien invasion stories feel utterly stupid to me.

            I can still live with 'War of the worlds': their aliens only come from Mars not from the stars, and I can suspend my disbelief over eg its theory of how the planets formed: it's just a fantasy world where outer planets formed earlier and are older.

            But the Three Body Problem tries to be current-ish with modern technology. And its aliens have enough technology to just build orbitals or terraform Mars or so. Or just kill off all the humans from space with an orbital bombardment or a killer virus. Instead of whatever clunky and ineffective methods they use in the book.

            I did like the start though, when things were still kept behind the curtain. Also the Cultural Revolution flashbacks, too.

            War of the Worlds never lifts that curtain for sure. Everything stays fairly mysterious, and the narrative only gives us some limited speculation from the narrator who clearly has also only a limited view on things.

        • By gilleain 2025-05-016:14

          Are you not confusing 'liking' a work with 'thinking it good'. I'm not sure what criteria go into your evaluation, but perhaps those criteria are different from the ones other people are using?

        • By alpaca128 2025-05-0123:21

          If a belief needs to assume most people are stupid compared to you, it's basically guaranteed to be wrong.

          Talk to more people, you'll find they can think too.

        • By michaelhoney 2025-05-017:19

          ... or maybe it's not objectively bad, and you're bouncing off it for some reason?

          Per the parent comment, it does a lot with very little. And it's heady and literary and beautiful. Not everyone is into that. But a lot of people are.

        • By dripdry45 2025-05-018:35

          Guh, NK Jemisin :Q I tried getting through a few chapters of three of her books and haven't felt so... Pushed? Talked at? Bored? Hadn't grimaced internally and externally as much with an author in a while.

          They feel juvenile, trying SO hard. Using a different person perspective in one of them to hamfisted effect, as opposed to someone like Tamsyn Muir who integrates that device for good reason and to brilliant effect.

          I gave NK a solid try and was appalled at how in the world anyone could think these are engaging.

    • By pcblues 2025-05-016:55

      Not sure if anyone here saw the movie Clueless, but a great quote was, "That guy is such a Monet. From a distance he looks great, but up close he's a real mess."

    • By hammock 2025-05-0114:36

      "Fill the gaps with your mind" is very broad, and applies to lighting, pointillism, etc a divers lot of things that are not obvious to a non-painter.

      But Vermeer is next level, especially for the time. A growing contingent of historians believe he used camera obscura to achieve the results

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis

    • By parrit 2025-05-019:43

      Your brain is analysing the light in the "room" when zoomed out and compared to that it looks moist. When you zoom in there is no reference. I think then the brain switches from "real scene" analysis to "abstract".

      It is a bit like those illusions where one grey looks darker than the other, based on surrounding shadows in the image and what the brain assumes... but the RGB values are the same.

    • By userbinator 2025-05-013:162 reply

      Zooming in, it's a bit of a muddy mess

      The analog equivalent of pixelation.

      • By jychang 2025-05-017:14

        More like the analog version of doing a FTT and looking at only the high frequency parts vs the low frequency parts.

      • By cgriswald 2025-05-013:241 reply

        It's like touching it with your eye, without the pain. I love the future.

        • By HideousKojima 2025-05-013:31

          It's like the museum scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Off when Cameron is staring super intently at the painting

    • By agumonkey 2025-05-0111:18

      A bit like how CRT era video games are horrible when viewed on modern LCDs. Designers and programmers walked around the device limits to get impressions out of it.

    • By cmehdy 2025-05-014:001 reply

      We think that everything is made of things but we forget that everything is mostly made of nothing, and it's the gaps between things that make it all be.

      See also: atomic size vs distance between atoms in any structure, on perceptual levels the visual saccadic movement and how much the brain fills in the gaps.

      Nothing is quite something after all.

      • By markovs_gun 2025-05-0110:571 reply

        I hate this phrase because how do you even define "made of nothing" or "gaps between" when talking about objects as fuzzy as electrons, and how would you define where something "is" or "isn't " other than interactions? If an electron cloud is interacting with another electron cloud why do we say that space is empty? Because the measured radius of an electron is so much smaller than we observe?

        • By monadINtop 2025-05-0111:46

          Like you say, it's just a more intuitive classical analogy for people who don't want to waste good years of their life (like me) to understand the mathematical detail of theoretical physics.

          The electron doesn't actually have a measured radius (in our current theories). QFT describes it as point-like excitation of an underlying quantum field. The only connection between our quantum theories (that is really just slightly hand wavy math) and reality is that our theories can predict the statistics of observing a particle or interaction in a given state. So maybe a slightly more coherent explanation is that for a given region between atoms in solid matter, the probability of observing an electron (or any particle) is extremely small. Its like a quantum mechanical cat who's territory extends across mountains and forests, you're probably not gonna stumble across it on any given day, unlike a (quantum) house cat that lives in someones apartment. More generally there are no big "lumps" in the wave-functions, it's very thinly spread like too little butter on toast.

    • By theSuda 2025-05-0116:01

      I zoomed in and zoomed out instantly as soon as I realized it was breaking the illusion for me. I just love how our brain actually fills in these gaps.

    • By fcatalan 2025-05-016:18

      You can also see that the hanging yellow part of the headscarf, he just winged it, effective as it might be.

      I paint as a sort of weekly ritual, just 2 hours every Wednesday evening, and did an inept copy of this as my first serious try. Months of staring closely at every little detail of it leave you in a sort of communion with the work and the artist.

      One thing you quickly learn is that the old masters were "impressionists" too. If you overwork stuff trying to perfect every shape with hundreds of precise brushstrokes, you end up with a naive, infantile looking painting that feels "unpainterly".

      Trying and failing to mimic that single quick brushtroke that fools the eye leaves you in awe, fully appreciating the mastery.

    • By amelius 2025-05-019:38

      Yes from a distance the lips look moist/wet, but the cracks in the paint make them look dry, up close.

    • By drob518 2025-05-013:49

      Yep, I noticed the same thing and came to a similar realization.

    • By fennecbutt 2025-05-030:31

      Perhaps for casual readers.

      But say you write a pop culture hit, people start looking deeper, and the gaps become glaring.

      Like the fusion drives in the expanse, it's hand waved on the first read through, but on the second I found that someone had calculated it online (like this https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-dr...) and now it kinda ruins the vibe, the author should have chosen something outside of current science (basically magic) or used a technology that's feasible.

      Also, the ships fucking explode when they lose magnetic fusion containment...whereas in reality it would just dissipate...

    • By pinoy420 2025-05-016:36

      [dead]

  • By lubujackson 2025-05-013:076 reply

    I highly recommend the movie "Tim's Vermeer" about the likelihood that Vermeer used something like a lightbox to paint his paintings. Specifically, his ability to reproduce light and color is unmatched while he only had basic training as a painter and never let anyone see him work. A fascinating engineering problem to deduce how he might have accomplished this.

    • By dewarrn1 2025-05-014:041 reply

      It's an appealing hypothesis, but there's some compelling evidence to the contrary [0]. I'm not an expert, but this could potentially fall under the heading of pop history or pseudohistory.

      [0] https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4707

      • By adastra22 2025-05-014:151 reply

        Watch Tim’s Vermeer. The camera obscura doesn’t work (for similar reasons as mentioned in the article). Don’t want to spoil it, but Tim comes up with a very low tech solution that fits all the evidence.

        • By dewarrn1 2025-05-0123:141 reply

          It sounds like a compelling film. Seeing now that it's produced by Penn & Teller's team, it makes me wonder about this fits into their "juggler vs. magician" dichotomy. The implication of that duo producing the film suggests that they might believe that Vermeer's reputation as an extraordinarily skilled artist ("juggler") might in fact be the result of Vermeer's use of a sophisticated apparatus that tricked patrons and viewers into thinking that he had extraordinary abilities, thus making Vermeer a master faker ("magician"). Or maybe they simply wanted to spur debate.

          • By adastra22 2025-05-030:21

            Yes, it is a story narrated by Penn and Teller (well, just Penn). I don’t recall them ever speaking negatively about Vermeer for having used a contraption to get perfect perspective. And the contraption that Tim comes up with is super simple—basically a dental mirror. If anything, they speak very positively about the ingenious of the method, and seemed to respect Vermeer greatly, if I remember correctly.

    • By diego_moita 2025-05-013:151 reply

      It isn't a bad hypothesis.

      Many people speculate that the model for the "The Astronomer" and "The Geographer" was Leeuwenhoek, the creator of the first microscope. He was a close friend of Vermeer.

      And the use of devices for helping in drawing was actually quite common in those times. Durer and Da Vinci made drawings showing these kind of devices.

      • By noufalibrahim 2025-05-017:34

        It's a great science documentary though. His obsession, how he works towards it and the emotional effect the whole project has on him. Worth watching regardless of your opinion on the hypothesis.

    • By thatgerhard 2025-05-019:10

      "Generally, you don't take a fine precision machine tool [a lathe] and saw it in half... but power tools are made to be jury rigged." - Tim

    • By y-curious 2025-05-014:37

      Thank you! I watched some clips on YouTube and I'm very impressed by Tim's technique's efficacy.

    • By aestetix 2025-05-0112:431 reply

      I highly recommend against watching the movie. The main figure, Tim Jenison, comes off as an arrogant know-it-all, reducing art to a technique, and insulting people along the way. In the movie, multiple times he said "I have never done this before, but how hard could it be?"

      I'll note two parts of the movie that support my view. First, if his art is so great, then why is it not displayed all over the place? He has a few alleged experts giving praise without criticism, and in the end, it is on the wall in his bedroom. Surely, if the art were that easy to recreate, galleries would be demanding his piece?

      Second, notice how they never actually show the real painting. In fact, at one point they make it out to be a conspiracy, that the painting is being kept in some back room nobody can access. I would loved to have seen the real painting side-by-side with Tim's alleged reproduction. I suspect they didn't push to hard for access, because it would have ruined their narrative.

      • By CollinEMac 2025-05-0114:501 reply

        I agree that Tim definitely comes off as a bit of a jerk. However...

        > First, if his art is so great, then why is it not displayed all over the place? He has a few alleged experts giving praise without criticism, and in the end, it is on the wall in his bedroom. Surely, if the art were that easy to recreate, galleries would be demanding his piece?

        I could be wrong but I don't think there's much demand for replicas of classic paintings even if they are incredibly high quality. A lot of the value of a Vermeer painting is that it was actually painted by Vermeer in the 17th century -- not necessarily the quality of the piece itself.

        Regarding your second point, who knows?

        • By aestetix 2025-05-0115:423 reply

          I thought the point of the movie was to claim that Vermeer was nothing special, and Tim's effort to recreate the painting was supposed to prove that. I think the galleries would disagree with that point, otherwise they would not care whether Vermeer actually painted them.

          And yes, both of my points are speculation, fueled by an immense dislike for the movie.

          • By daseiner1 2025-05-0116:481 reply

            If the claims are true then Vermeer is absolutely exceptional, just in a different manner than is usually considered.

            All painters must grapple with the technical nature of paint itself and its manipulation. Choice of type of paint, canvas, application, &c. is paramount. Rothko’s work, for instance, is only effective because he found a novel way to apply paint that lends his paintings a remarkable, nigh eerie depth of color. Spending roughly half an hour just staring at the Seagram murals in the “Rothko Room” at the Tate Modern is one of my all-time favorite experiences.

            • By resize2996 2025-05-0118:161 reply

              There have been posts about reproducing art and I always thinking maybe I could make a mini-Rothko room in spare room.

              • By daseiner1 2025-05-0121:46

                that would be cool! sincerely. post it here if you do.

                i feel like the above comment might come across as sarcastic but i genuinely find it super cool when a layman can master a new discipline with force of will and publicly available writings. much like vermeer's much speculated-upon clever use of technology ;)

          • By colonelspace 2025-05-0116:34

            The point of the documentary was to show that Vermeer may have used optics.

            That's it.

          • By adastra22 2025-05-030:27

            I think you are projecting. I don’t recall getting any of that from the movie, which I recall being very respectful of Vermeer’s legacy. The narrators (Penn and Teller) are themselves magicians and it would be immensely hypocritical of them to denigrate an artist by showing there’s an underlying trick.

    • By vanderZwan 2025-05-017:531 reply

      Side-rant: I just watched a clip[0] and I have to say something about the misrepresentation of the Hockney-Falco thesis[1] in it.

      And when I say I have to I really mean that: I'm Dutch, tried studying physics, dropped out, switched to studying art, specifically photography (even built my own camera at one point), then in the first year of art school was introduced to the Hockney-Falco thesis, then went to the International Congress of Physics Students one last time to hang out with my friends, decided to give a talk on the topic, and ended up winning best talk of the conference. So I'm kind of obliged to Have Some Opinions on this topic.

      The clip mentions the HF thesis as if Hockney introduced the notion that the Dutch painters in Vermeer's time used optical tools. That's... not what the thesis claimed. Johannes Vermeer lived in the 17th century[2]. As the clip (correctly) states, telescopes and mirrors were known to the Netherlands by then - in fact the earliest known records of a refracting telescope is from a failed patent application in the Netherlands in 1608[3].

      From what I remember, the hypothesis that Vermeer used optical tools wasn't controversial even back in the mid-2000s, a decade before this film came out. While there was no direct proof, he did live in the right place and period to have been introduced to telescopes, and artists trying out new tools is obviously a thing that happened throughout history. Being secretive about his work was obviously also very suspicious. I recall that we also discussed how certain visual qualities of the painting suggested the use of optical tools - Vermeer's style was also just so noticeably different and photograph-like compared to his peers. To be clear, nobody thought this diminished the quality of Vermeer's paintings: he was still innovating and mastering his tools, and creating the beautiful paintings that he made still took tremendous skill.

      However, what the Hockney-Falco thesis claims is that Early Renaissance painters like, say, Jan van Eyck[4] already used optical tools, centuries before telescopes and optical mirrors optics were introduced in Europe. We're talking 15th century onwards. And not only that, that this was secret knowledge hidden by the painter's guilds, of which no known record survives even though we have records of all the other painting techniques used. That's what makes it so controversial.

      The hypothesis that there was a painter who lived during a time of great innovation in optical tools in the place where those innovations took place, then secretly used those tools to get a leg up on the competition is very plausible.

      The suggestion that the entirety of Europe's Renaissance painters learned about optical tools from Arab lands but managed to keep this knowledge secret for centuries sounds like a conspiracy theory.

      (also, it's completely ignorant of the realistic qualities of some of the old Roman art[5], and those painters definitely did not have high quality lenses available to them)

      [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoqWwuRnj3o

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis

      [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Vermeer

      [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_telescope

      [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_van_Eyck

      [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_art

      • By trylfthsk 2025-05-0115:031 reply

        This does make me wonder what kinds of secrets can and can't be kept; on the face of it, that a critical bit of insider information would be kept for oral transmission at particular times (something like a mystery cult) leads me to think that keeping such a secret is at least possible.

        At the same time, people love gossip.

        Of course, the only secrets we know from the past were by definition not exactly well-kept.

        • By vanderZwan 2025-05-0116:46

          They'd also have to paint without anyone seeing them paint. The fact that Vermeer stood out for being so secretive about his process says something here. Even a no-lens camera obscura would be pretty hard to hide given that it would require to be painting in a darkened room next to the person being painted.

          But your question is an interesting one, for sure. Revealed secrets come in different flavors - fully known ones, but also "known unknown" types of secrets, like the exact "recipes" a painter might have used for their paints being a mystery. However, when it comes to "unknown unknowns" hiddeo secrets I think it's very hard to keep those when dealing with more than a handful of individuals.

  • By MaxRegret 2025-05-014:222 reply

    Steve Mould just released a video about the microscopy technique that was used to capture this 3D relief of the painting: https://youtu.be/o-dZKBwbsis

    • By petargyurov 2025-05-018:142 reply

      The microscope used for this is mind blowing. Falls squarely into the list of things I want but do not need.

      • By justsid 2025-05-0114:191 reply

        After watching the video I was trying to find out just how much one of those microscopes cost. Couldn’t find a price anywhere so I’m assuming it’s far out of my budget. But this kind of video is probably the greatest kind of ad there is, just genuinely showing how cool something is. Don’t have a use for it either though, but I would love to have one anyways.

        • By internetter 2025-05-0117:28

          Seems like a fun DIY project. Take an off the shelf digital microscope and attach motors!

      • By j_bum 2025-05-023:36

        I want one so badly, some of that footage is just unreal

        My first guess was that it’s a clean $30k. Now I’m going to add a digit and guess $100k.

    • By frainfreeze 2025-05-0110:432 reply

      Was it the same approach? The 3D relief has artifacts akin to ones produced by heightmaps

      • By jedimastert 2025-05-0120:14

        This would line up with the approach talked about in the video. In very short terms, pictures were taken at various focus distances and height was defined as whichever distance was the sharpest. This would essentially make a 2D height map with all of the artifacts that would come with it

      • By artimaeis 2025-05-0112:321 reply

        Click the "3D" button on the bottom-center toolbar to see the 3D scan artifact.

        • By mxfh 2025-05-0117:36

          It's has 5x exaggerated height by default, so maybe that's what makes it look wonky. Looks way better by 1x.

          If you really want to capture the full visual information of a painting, you'd need full PBR-style data — reflective, refractive, subsurface properties — essentially the response of the surface from any viewing angle in the hemisphere, lit from at least a few fixed directions (like in a museum light setup). Even limited to the visible spectrum, this would massively increase the amount of data needed to represent the image accurately.

          The 2019 scan apparently deliberately removed reflections, even though they're an essential part of the artist's intended expression.

          Are there models that simulate the actual physical properties of paintings — under artificial lighting, viewed from arbitrary angles? Seems like a worthwhile direction for preserving artworks beyond their flat 2D captures. It could also enable virtually accurate displays of art for single observers using head-tracked screens or VR.

          Might also be a promising use case for NERFs or 3D Gaussian Splatting.

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