Real Artifacts


Rendering is hard, partly because the real world doesn't look as good as we think it does. We find real phenomena that resemble computer graphics artifacts amusing. Here are some real photographs that look like rendered images, sometimes because the photographer was trying to make it look synthetic, and sometimes because life can imitate the "art" of computer graphics.

Click on the image to see the full-size local copy; click on "Source" at the end of the caption for the source page, if any.

Exhibits are displayed by acquisition date, newest to oldest. Museum begun in 2007 by Morgan McGuire; his original gallery starts at the break as marked. Newer material curated by Eric Haines since 2016.

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Last changed: January 21, 2024
Y axis flip problem, or part of a project called "The World Upside Down." Source
NPR image, or the result of a winter storm. Source and more
Up axis translation bug, or a particularly short car. Source
Semitransparency applied to the blade, or a well-aligned reflection. Source
Sometimes only half the model loads. Source
Undersampled motion blur, or a picture of some mugs in a store. This one hurts my eyes to look at it. Source thanks to Pete Shirley
Voxelization bug, or a sculpture by Han Hsu-Tung. Source
It's frustrating when you lose a triangle in your mesh; having backface culling cause the interior to disappear just calls more attention to the problem. Source
Low quality shadow filtering (via Morgan McGuire's RT). Source. Similar sampling problems here.
Lights only render, materials unassigned (thanks, Moritz Weller). Source, third picture in series.
Procedural modeling bug (via Pete Shirley). Source
When scale factors go awry (found on reddit's r/confusing_perspective). Source
Uninitialized data in a render target texture after rendering all 3D objects but before rendering the skybox (thanks, Adam Sawicki). Source
To quote Stefan Werner, "Subtract 0.5 from the displacement map," or an artwork by Erwin Wurm. Source
Box mapping (thanks, Pierre-Félix Breton). Source
Y translation problem, or she's behind a ground-level wall (thanks, Ryan Haines). Source
Only had enough memory for five different textures [click image to see the full-sized photo for the effect] (thanks, Kienan A.).
Bad vertical positioning of a trash bin in a scene, or a wet spot in front of it. Source
It's not uncommon to accidentally apply the same texture and shader to all surfaces (thanks, Pierre-Félix Breton). Source
When you can only afford a 10x10 shadow map (courtesy of Mauricio Vives).
Environment mapping on a simple test object, or the Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago. Source
Bug in the interpolation of samples in a shadow map, or arrays of LED lights? The title of this work is "My country is so poor it even has low quality shadows." Source
Multiple textures put in the same image to avoid texture switching, or a single photo. Many other nicely-aligned photos here. Source
Extreme Peter-Panning of shadows, or Lake Charlevoix in Michigan has the clearest ice you will ever see. Source
Odd bump mapping, or entirely flat farmland in eastern Colorado with wind-blown and melted patches of snow. Source
NPR and realistic shading combined, or a cafe in Seoul. Source. And, see a more elaborate version in Sydney, Australia.
Some horizontal offset problem or clipping plane bug, or the sliced footwear art of Sakir Gokcebag. Source
Test scenes for area light source reflections, or Reuben Wu's work done with a moving drone equipped with a lighting rig. Source
Refraction? Check. Depth of field? Got it. Caustics? Looking good. Specular reflection off of glass material? TODO... Source
In Montreal, that building in the middle appears to have the front faces culled out (courtesy of Mauricio Vives). Another view to make sense of it.
Lights shining on 50 disco balls makes the scene look like an undersampled ray trace. Source
A debugging view showing the surfaces without textures applied. Or forced perspective. Source
A tower at Google in San Francisco had its material set to be semi-transparent. Or the Napa fires around 10/10/2017 caused a haze in front of the building, illuminated by the sun (thanks, Paul Debevec; Facebook if you are friends).
This church in Borgloon, Belgium, has a rendering bug. Source
This image of the restaurant at LAX looks like it is a debug visualization for an acceleration data structure (thanks, David Larsson). Source
Objects are made to look as if they were deleted using an image manipulation program. Source
Artist Julien Attiogbe covered a building with distorted photos of itself. Source
Edoardo Tresoldi's pavillion make of wire - a true wire-frame construction. Source
A temple covered in ash from the Ontake volcanic eruption, Japan. From a large collection of unusual photos, it's the fourth one down. Source
When the sun is directly overhead in Hawaii, it looks like a bad video game render. Source
The world's blackest material looks like a bug (thanks, Pierre-Félix Breton). It is also part of an art world tiff. Source
The 'Still File' project made this scene to look like a classic Whitted ray trace. See the three other images, and how they did it. Source

original gallery, 2016 on back
That was not the color of caustic that I expected. Source
The studio-level lighting, exotic costume, short hair, and plasticy skin (from makeup) conspire to make this cosplayer read as a high-quality CG render. Source
These clouds just look wrong!
A thin layer of water on a salt lake creates a mirrored surface that looks like an overly glossy desert sand BRDF. Source
This car's mirror surface looks like the material artist got too carried away with chrome. Source
Color bleeding? Wireframe? Ambient occlusion? This looks like a beautiful radiosity test. Source
These interleaved post-it notes create an effect that resembles z-fighting (thanks, Tomasz). Source
The focused crepuscular rays through the atmosphere created by reflection from that building look fake.
This carpet's pattern resembles incorrectly assigned texture coordinates or a bug in a projection matrix computation.
A real, 3D shoulder bag designed in a style that looks like hand-drawn animation.
A colored glossy reflection creates an unexpected red wall paper pattern (thanks, Pete). Source
Peter Shirley took this photograph in which the glossy highlight on the metal building appears to be too bright and in the wrong place because it is brushed metal (better check your surface normals, Pete!).
Adam Sawicki sends this real life shadow that looks like the aliasing artifacts from low-resolution PCF shadow maps. Source
Padraic Hennessey sends these peeled potatoes, which look like they have been ray marched with too few iterations.
The reflections in the lake look like undersampled stochastic reflections. From Aras Pranckevičius' blog. Source
Tomás saraceno's net installations look like Photoshop disasters when photographed. Source
This kind of boosted-saturation color bleeding usually only happens in CG. Source
Here's that path tracer reflection test that you rendered (Thanks, Eric). Source
A snowy scene looks a lot like an ambient occlusion-only rendering (Thanks, Mauricio).
Eric Haines needs better shadow-map biasing, since he's getting single-texel light leaks. Or maybe there are tiny holes in his window blinds.
The camera is exactly at the height of a former flood line, making the picture look like there was a bit error leading to incorrect decoding of the lower scan lines. From The Line by Palindromo Meszaros (Thanks, Eric). Source
The water is so clear that it looks like the shadow-map bias was cranked up too high (Thanks, Tomasz "Dab" Dąbrowski).
Camel thorn trees against an orange dune at sunrise look like a painting (Thanks, Aaron Size). Source
Aliased shadows look like bad shadow map filtering; taken in the stands of a baseball stadium. (Thanks, Padraic Hennessy).
Basalt pillars look like some sort of modeling error, or hexagonal voxels. Source
Real-world interpenetration (Thanks, Adam). Source
Strobing lights create the appearance of temporal undersampling artifacts on the blurred snow. Source
Federico Diaz's sculpture at MoCA. This image is a visualization; the real sculpture is also made of voxels but has a different shape. (Thanks, Adam). Source
Justin Harder's voxel motorbike (Thanks, Adam). Source
Horizontally scrambled sculpture: forgot your end of row padding again? (Thanks, Eric). Source
Giant 30-story sinkhole in Guatemala is so perfectly cylindrical that it looks artificial. Source
Real animated 3D sculpture that looks like a rendered wireframe teapot (Thanks, Spike). Source
The tree in the midground looks like the Stanford Bunny, a common rendering test object (Thanks, Adam Sawicki). Source
Looks like radiosity---a fact that was not lost on Cindy Goral. Click through to the comparable image from her seminal thesis. Source
Voxel/oct-tree car--check out the shadow (thanks Eric Haines). Source
Floating man optical illusion / bad shadow map bias (thanks Eric Haines and Pete Shirley). Source
NPR female model (thanks Eric Haines). Source
Synthetic-looking real house (thanks David Luebke).
Hard stenciled shadows in the desert again (thanks Eric). Source
"Undersampled" shadows in Pete Shirley's living room due to his window blinds.
"L-System Plant" by Adam Sawicki (who notes it's called Rhipsalis, in case you want to get one).
"Percentage Closer Filtering" by Adam Sawicki.
Eric Testroete's "Low Poly Head". Source
"Voronoi Diagram Model" by Adam Sawicki (although my colleague Frank Morgan would tell you that bubbles are not Voronoi!).
Benedict Radcliffe's wireframe car.
Sara Watson's "invisible car" (from DailyMail).
"Undersampled" shadows in the Seattle Public Library's Faye G. Allen Children's Center. Source

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