May 22 2007Photo-realistic Illustrator art

All that work to end up with the picture he started with.

Amazing considering what you can do with that image now it is a vector graphic. Must have taken ages to complete though.

three words: not. worth. it.

one word: prettyf***ingincredibleifyouaskme.

It is pretty freakin amazing, never seen something done in illustrator look so 3D. It does open the image up to a large variety of uses. Now you can blow the image up to the size of a building and not loose any resolution...

awesome!

This one is the best:

http://venus.oracchi.com/Illustrator/mechanical/nagra.htm

Full. On. Mentalist.

What a bunch of half-assed pictures.

What is the point of this? I am not amazed.

My man must really like the pen tool! I can't believe he took the time to trace that texture by hand. I'd like to see the gradient meshes as well.

Somebody PLEASE tell me that the top pic is not the final result.

I just browsed thru the source website and it shows some ridiculous pics that look so freaking real... there's NO WAY that dude did that with just Illustrator.

The outline is nice and all but I think the actual work this guy does in the picture-like images... this is surreal....

That's f*cking amazing. The only thing I don't like is the shadow under the lense, where two parts merge, since that seems a little realistic, but then again, I don't have a model of that camera to see the accuracy of the peice. Still, that's amazing.

So this guy knows a bit about tracing and Bezier curves, no reason to give him the Nobel Prize or anything. Quit wetting your pants.

that's really good. a very focused artist.

That's pretty good, but I wouldn't call it amazing. Like many people have already said, it's an insane amount of work to end up with the image he started with. Unless the guy is SUPER fast and works for peanuts, there's really very little application for this.
Oh, and if you want impressive, there are images of people that almost reach this level of photorealism (some do reach this level, down to skin texture) that are done with Illustrator as well. Hunt those down.

computer sorcery.

INDEED!

i work in adobe illustrator and unless he's workin with version 8, transparencies and feathering effects makes it actually quite doable. when i was a watch designer i knew ppl who could do some seriously amazing stuff.
but i see no point in replicating an existing object in adobe illustrator to this point either.

cool, nice work ;)

The reason you'd do that much work to replicate the original image is he can now blow it up to the size of a billboard, and it would still look good! No pixelation.

I'LL always say dat unless you got a purpose or pasion for so much work itsnt worth it..

People that say that there is no practical application for this type of illustration have probably never played the latest video games or don't understand that bitmapped images would not look good when they go beyond there pixel count. As games become more realistic, the need for artist that can produce this kind of photorealism will be needed unless you like the "blocky" graphics on your video games. To the majority of us, this would not be practical, but if you want your video game graphics to advance to the next level, then people who take the time to be able to do images like the one above should be applauded for doing something that we would not do ourselves.

If you're an expert and know what you're doing, like the guy who did this, it really wouldn't take that long. And yes, it's entirely possible to get something looking that realistic with gradients.

#21 has a point - Illustrator doesn't make pictures look pixelated when they stretch, but keeps them looking smooth and to-scale. It's a great idea to use for gaming design.