[Japong]

DISCLAIMER: None of the images in this post are mine. All credit goes to Highside and his site, Real Trace(translated). I'm hosting these image on my webspace because direct-linking is useful, but impolite if you're using someone else's bandwidth.

Now, I'm sure a few of you have probably been to Highside's personal gallery,, and seen the amazing adobe illustrator art this guy has done. If not, go and take a look - this is a pretty good example of what to expect:





Now, I've never seen anything like this done in Illustrator before. If anyone
else knows of  illustrator work of similar quality, please, drop a link for me!

However, the work he's done on Real Trace surpasses even that, and this is where the point of this post comes in:




Can anyone explain how *that* is possible in illustrator? As far as I can tell from looking at the gallery page, the furry cats are not a reference, but the final image. I can't read highside's explanation, as the accompanying text is written directly on the jpeg files, and thus untranslatable.

Finally, has anyone been able to get ahold of/translate the Real Trace book? The samples of it once again are untranslatable for an aglophone such as myself, so if anyone knows of an english edition that explains these techniques, please reply!

[Rictor]

Yeah, I saw this a few weeks ago.

Simply unreal. Its right up there with the Pyramids and the Parthenon is you ask me.

edit: though I haven't seen the cats. Like I said, simply unreal

[Grug]

I'd say that's too good.
Are you sure its not a tracing of the outline of the reference images.
Because they look way to real.

If not, damn this guy is good.

[-Vulture-]

Wow, thats simply amazing, those things look real, and i mean real. Especially the fine hairs of the cats are amazing...

[Japong]

He uses a photo-reference, and then traces, but the end result is his own render -  if you look at the way the animated gif carefully, you'll clearly see him rendering *underneath* the straps on the glove, which wouldn't make any sense at all if he were just tracing the mesh.  I'm pretty certain all the stuff you see is the real deal - even if you compare the mesh of the cats and the render, you'll see that the edges (check around the ear) extend beyond, because the mesh also includes the blurring effect that he uses - same with the gallery picture of the cars - he's reflecting some of the image in the mesh, which also indicates that its a render.

[Corsair]

Unreal is right. Dammmmmmn...

[Rictor]

Tracing a photo isn't cheating. In fact, for anything more complex than a basic shape its a must.

[Carl]

it's fake.

[Grug]

Care to explain Carl?

[Rictor]

For the trouble it took to make those wireframes, he could have done the real thing. Which means faking it would serve no purpose. Which means they're not fake (aside from the fact that you can see that they are vectorized in a few of the pictures.)

[Grug]

If you goto the website it says 'Real Trace'.
I'm presuming that he's tracing reference images and then redoing them.

Still a lot of work involved even if he did use a tracing program like Streamline.

For most of those pics you can see where its drawn, those cats however are too realistic I think. The cat image looks like a photo...

[Swamp_Thing]

I´d say that the left cat is real, while the one on the right is a photo. Look at the diferences of light, blurr efects, and lack of outline between one and the other. The glove might be real, but the cat is not.

Also, if he used a real photo to trace and draw that, what´s the point? The idea is making something you don´t have. Why would you go over the trouble to make a photorealistic representation of a cat, if you have already a photo? What´s the point?
If he tried to draw a figment of his imagination, something that exists only in his head, that would be cool and worthy of admiration. But using an existing photograph to draw the exact same thing, seems useless to me.  I´d say it´s borderline cheating, actually.

[Turnsky]

actually, on those cat pics, i can easily tell where PS's blur/smudge tools were used

[Grug]

Looking closely I can see the effects and what not on the cat, but that could of still been an original photograph.

Just from some of his other stuff in his gallery though he is definitly good at what he does.
The cat one is probably his best one, and is the only one I doubt that it wasnt drawn from scratch.

[Ransom]

Originally posted by Swamp_Thing
If he tried to draw a figment of his imagination, something that exists only in his head, that would be cool and worthy of admiration. But using an existing photograph to draw the exact same thing, seems useless to me.

Ransom agrees. The person has an incredible amount of skill, yes, but I loathe work like this.

[an0n]

Well, having seen what PeachE can do just for ****s-n-giggles, I'm gonna give this guy the benefit of the doubt.

[Japong]

The purpose, as far as I can tell, is that this is vector art - it's very useful because it can be enlarged, infinitely, and not lose any quality or pixelate - you could print that on a billboard and it would still look razor-sharp - I'm guessing that a lot of the work that this guy does is corporate.

Turnsky: These are vector pics - that blurring-smudging is done by a vector mask, so no PS tools were involved. It would kind of remove the point if after everything he went back and applied bitmap effects.

[MatthewPapa]

We need to get that guy to texture some of our models...
That is almost too good to be true.

[WMCoolmon]

First reaction (to the glove):

AGGHHH!!! HOLY ****!!!!

As for the cats:

They could be a photograph, but looking closely, the whiskers seem slightly too purple and the brown spot around the pupil of the right cat seems to be drawn. So I think it could go either way (Ask the guy for the raw file )

[Setekh]

That stuff is just insane. I'm constantly amazed at the efforts some people will go to create art (myself in the past included).