I began research with lighting engineers at two companies; Autodesk-3DS Max and Newtek-Lightwave. They produce leading software available for CGI work used by the reseachers.
My letter had to be benign of any possible legal, hence very mundane describing everyone
Kris, thank you for your encouragement in this research and suggestions when this began. Cheers
Here is the letter I sent to both companies. After the 17th of August I will have a chance to communicate with Newtec engineers:
begin -
Thank you for taking the time regarding this issue. I and a couple of other people, have been researching, as a serious hobby, an event that occured outside in daylight, afternoon sun and was captured in several photographs by one camera.
There is a small group of people on an internet forum that takes an interest in this matter we are researching. A few of them are computer graphic artists and they have created CGI studies of these photographs with your product and several other CGI programs available. Their work has been commendable and would make your company proud.
We are not sure if the EXIF data is accurate about time, but studies show that it is showing approximately the correct time according to cgi re-created studies of the objects based on the shadows in one of the original photographs. However, there is still a dispute within the group of cgi artists about the exact angle of the sun.
More to the point of this letter, is a debate arising where some CGI artists are claiming shadow inconsistencies between the two objects in the photographs, at a very small detail level, within a relatively slight variance of the suns actual position. This would indicate that the picture is actually a composite of the two objects, with sun angle not identical on both objects. Other CGI artists are not so sure how viable this variance is because it is dependent on the exact replication in CGI of the objects positions relative to the camera as well as other possible factors.
Because of this ensuing debate, it is important to assess the viability of using these CGI programs in such a forensic manner.
Please allow me a little bit of your time to discus this matter further in order to gain some insight into the limits of use regarding the finer factors of recreating precisely the ambient conditions and effects of an outdoor environment in a photograph.
Yours truly,
