
Technologists have produced a 3D-printed painting in the style of Rembrandt - mdturnerphys
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35977315
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roywiggins
If it were a -human- painting a fake Rembrandt, no matter how perfect an
imitation, it would be called "a very very good imitation of Rembrandt" and
nobody would claim that they'd in any sense brought Rembrandt back to life.
Calling a very good forged Rembrandt a "new Rembrandt" would be pretty silly.

Calling one generated by a computer a "new Rembrandt" seems just as silly.
Just because it was composed by an algorithm doesn't make it Rembrandtier than
one painted by an expert forger.

Pretty cool as a technical achievement, though.

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antimora
Computers are our new babies. We applause and cheer for anything trivial they
come up with.

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Lerc
I think it might just be a simple as interpreting your work in the most
significant way increases exposure and potential grant money.

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ma2rten
I feel like it's misleading of them to say that a computer painted the
picture. That makes it sound like all works of Rembrandt have been fed into a
Machine Learning algorithm and finally the computer spit out this piece.

After having watched the YouTube video, I fell like actually the picture was
more or less photoshopped together from existing Rembrandt paintings. The role
of the algorithms was "only" to generate the most average / representative of
his works.

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howlingfantods
I used to paint old masters portraits as a hobby (including Rembrandt). I
think it's a bit disingenuous to describe this as 'painting'. On top of
ma2rten's criticism that it basically photoshopped previous examples to create
a most representative work, I'd add that 3D printing with texture is not
painting. Rembrandt, in particular, was known for painting with countless
layers of semi transparent glazes to give his paintings a sense of depth and
an ethereal glow. He'd also mix his pigments with bindings aside from pure
linseed oil, sometimes adding chalk or glass. 3D printing the final result
with none of that process makes for a very limited reproduction.

Also, I'll add that I think it's very impressive, but I think they're
overselling it here.

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TheOtherHobbes
The 3D printed element is the least interesting part of the process because
it's literally superficial. There's no reason you couldn't set up a robotic
brush painter next to a robotic pigment factory to recreate all of the above.

However - what's interesting to me is that the only way to make this work was
by defining the features that were going to be included, analysing and
averaging them separately, and gluing them together to create a whole.

This wasn't a "Throw everything into an RNN and see if something useful falls
out" project. It deliberately separated specific target features.

That works well for an artist with very consistent and narrow clothing,
lighting, and background choices, and limited model poses.

It might not work so well for artists who included a much wider range of
imagery - which is probably most of them.

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Animats
It's an impressive achievement. But compare the computer generated image[1]
with a real Rembrandt of a similar subject at high resolution.[2] Compare the
detail in the neck ruff. Look at the iris of the eyes. (Why do Rembrandt's
people have no eyelashes?)

[1]
[http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/950/cpsprodpb/4B28/production...](http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/950/cpsprodpb/4B28/production/_89104291_rembrandt.jpg)
[2]
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Johannes...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Johannes_Wtenbogaert_by_Rembrandt_van_Rijn.jpg)

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sp332
I think your first link is not high-res enough. I don't know why but the
website breaks the image into tiles:
www.nextrembrandt.com/static/img/painting/painting_XX.jpg where interesting
values for XX are 17, 18, 22, 23, 24, 28, 29, 33. (Full range is 01-40
inclusive.)

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michaelmachine
youtube video showing the process
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuygOYZ1Ngo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuygOYZ1Ngo)

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bhrgunatha
They said they incorporated the height map from the original.

How did they obtain them? Do museums/galleries/owners let scientists or
engineers study the layers of paint of the physical paintings?

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huuu
Yes they let scientists study the layers.

You can create hight maps by casting light from each side of the painting and
using the shadows for your hight map calculations.

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huuu
Edit: this (old) tutorial shows how you can do it yourself:
[http://zarria.net/nrmphoto/nrmphoto.html](http://zarria.net/nrmphoto/nrmphoto.html)

I think a flat bed scanner is great for creating those maps. Just scan your
peace 4 times each time rotating it 90 degrees.

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awinter-py
elephants do really good abstract impressionism as long as you tell them when
to stop.

[http://www.getty.edu/education/teacherartexchange/archive/No...](http://www.getty.edu/education/teacherartexchange/archive/Nov06/0182.html)

Not to say that rembrandt = abstract impressionism. Still, the humans tagging
features is kind of a copout. The 'grain of salt' for these projects is to
look at the variation of outputs when you tweak the model inputs. In this case
it's going to be a head with oil paint texture 9 times out of 10 (and the
tenth will be cecilia jimenez 'I fix').

It won't be long until a computer can 'participate' in a genre and really
contribute to art. This project, while cool, isn't there yet.

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visarga
Take a look at these:

* Combining Markov Random Fields and Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Synthesis ([http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.04589](http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.04589))

* A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style ([http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06576](http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06576))

They do much more than photoshopping. It's actual synthesis of new images in
the style of a desired painter.

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awinter-py
neural blending side-by-side on p6 of the first paper is really cool

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amelius
If it was that easy, why didn't they produce more paintings?

I have the feeling that a lot of human work still went into this painting
(besides writing the algorithm).

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zitterbewegung
I'm interested in how they 3d printed this picture. Also how they colored it.

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WalterBright
I'm curious why I cannot get hi res scans of old masterpieces I can use as
wallpaper on my monitor. Doing image searches only turns up low res versions.

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Nvn
Check out:
[https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search?s=objecttype&p=1&ps=12&...](https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search?s=objecttype&p=1&ps=12&f.principalMaker.sort=Rembrandt%20Harmensz.%20van%20Rijn&ii=0)

They require you to make an account, but they have tens of thousands of public
domain photographs of many of the artworks in their collection.

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WalterBright
That looks awesome! Thanks!

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z3t4
It would be cool if we could upload a photo and then have it oil painted by a
computer in Rembrandt style.

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anonymousDan
Yes, and I imagine it would be a short step to having e.g. your portrait
painted in the style of an artist of your choice for a fraction of the cost. I
wonder could there be any intellectual property issues arising from this down
the line?

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dc2
Everybody keep calm - the Sublime Text 2 instance used to code in the video
was registered.

