🧵 Untitled Thread

Anonymous at Tue, 2 May 2023 19:29:57 UTC No. 944836

How can someone preserve their creations?
I've seen people write that digital art is volatile, but their viewpoint always seems incomprehensive.

Consider a fully modeled, textured, and rigged character or even a static scene; how do you preserve it?
All that data lives comfortably in the project file, but software comes and goes and different versions of the same software would have trouble opening the same file.
Maybe use interchange formats? Ok, but no software supports all interchange formats and no interchange format supports all features your software provides.
It becomes increasingly important to find a solution since ever increasing monitor resolutions can cause the rendered result of your work to be no longer suitable for viewing. Many digital artworks that were created in the early 2000s or 90s are the size of a postage stamp on modern displays. If you could store the "raw" data (models, textures, animations) you could just rerender your scene.
Except as technology improves, shading models change. Think about the difference in quality when renderers switched from scanline rendering to ray tracing to path tracing to whatever the new hotness is (metropolis light transport?). Sure those were all improvements, but at a certain point an artwork has to be "done" and however it looks is part of that regardless of whether or not it reflects the current skill level of the artist.

This is pretty different to traditional art.
Sure no two photographs of the same artwork can ever be identical; different lighting conditions/camera angle/etc. But those two photographs will be a lot closer together in quality than a CG scene rendered with a scanline renderer vs a bidirectional path tracer.
While different lighting conditions can affect traditional artwork, it doesn't affect the fundamental shading of the subject(s) of the artwork like how different light transport models would.

Maybe all this is stupid, but isn't there a way CG art can last at least the artist's life?