
How You Can Explore Nefertari’s Tomb in Hyper-Realistic VR - bcaulfield
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/10/31/explore-nefertaris-tomb-vr-virtual-reality/
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Theodores
Funny, I used an SGI Onyx Infinite Reality beast of a machine to do this two
decades ago. This was for TV and we had a really good lighting crew to make
the presenter look as if they were truly there and a brilliant cameraman to
make it all work in a 'hand held' style.

The beast of a machine had 256M of main memory and 64M of texture memory. Our
old-school TV skills produced results that you don't get with these new
fangled VR things, we had genuinely flickering candle light.

Have to say the sand on the ground is more realistic in this VR version.
Having worked on the tomb with some dedication it is funny how I recognise the
place instantly from the screen shots!

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cnasc
I'd be interested to see the TV program if it happens to be uploaded anywhere

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Theodores
Me too! I can't even remember what channel it was for, my Google Fu has not
helped me to find it.

Memories can deceive, however, thanks to my colleagues in the world of
lighting and camerawork (plus the edit suite) it was pretty good. We had CAD
files and all of the images, my challenge was to get the polygon count down to
something that could render in real time. The thing about it and why I think
my efforts were 'good' is that you still have to actually do all of the work,
it doesn't matter if you are using the fanciest computer or not - that ceiling
has to be 'painted' and that entrance hall has still got to be built.

We also needed some scenes of entering the tomb. So, as you can imagine, that
entailed building the view outside. We didn't quite have to build 'the whole
of Egypt' and model the entire Solar System (and universe) but it was getting
that way. There is a lot that can be done with choosing your camera shots
carefully and also using 'magic tricks', i.e. sleight of hand magician stuff,
so nobody notices that you haven't modelled absolutely everything.

The funniest thing I found was having my name in credits for various
programmes that people close to me watched. I enjoyed not owning up to my work
and being in the same room as a friend or a relative with my name going past
them on the screen for them to never notice. Happy times, so much was possible
in the 1990's.

