After the success of debuting his latest single "Happy Endings" as 10 non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Mike Shinoda is gearing up for another NFT project, this time with video creator Esteban Diácono.
Over the weekend, the Linkin Park cofounder gave fans a sneak peek of the upcoming drop on Instagram.
"First peek at my #nft drop with @_estebandiacono, coming Monday to @niftygateway. Here’s Esteban’s description about the concept of the project," he wrote before sharing the lengthy description, which you can read below.
The main collection is structured in 2 parts, one of them being dedicated to the tools and elements that have been a constant companion for more that 25 years, and another dedicated to the people who helped advance the field to the point where we are today.
For decades, very smart people have been studying and advancing the art of accurate, photorealistic representation of synthetic images. A key aspect of that, is the understanding of how light works in the real world and how to reproduce it in a render engine.
In that area, few test objects (more on this later) have been more useful than "The Cornell box", a test aimed at determining the accuracy of rendering software by comparing the rendered scene with an actual photograph of the same scene
It was created by Cindy Goral, Kenneth Torrance, Donald Greenberg, and Bennett Battaile at the Cornell University Program of Computer Graphics, in 1984.
This is the original photographed Cornell Box (slide 2)
A physical model of the box is created and photographed, and then everything is measured: emission of the light source, reflectance of all the surfaces, exact position and size of all objects, walls, light source and camera.
Then, you compare this data with the rendered image.
The physical properties of the box are designed to show diffuse interreflection. For example, some light should reflect off the red and green walls and bounce onto the white walls, so parts of the white walls should appear slightly red or green.
This may sound simple, but light bouncing from one surface from another and color bleeding was, when introduced, a giant step in realism for render engines.
Please note below the difference between NO light bouncing a YES light bouncing (slide 3)
The work of these people has been instrumental in giving us the tools we enjoy today. The images we effortlessly create today would not be possible without these teams, their papers, and these simple but immensely wise test objects that I learned to love over the years.
For those unfamiliar with NFTs, they're a type cryptocurrency that holds assets like art, tickets, and music instead of money. They operate on a publicly accessible and transparent network called a blockchain, which means anyone can see the details of the transaction. Computers involved in the transactions become part of the network, which continuously updates and can’t be hacked. The value of NFTs is subjective and fluctuates (think stocks).
See Shinoda's post below.
Photo: Getty Images