Above is artist Zsolt Ekho Farkas’s 3-D rendering of Gyula Benczúr’s 1896 painting The Recapture of Buda in 1686. Joe Berkowitz marvels that observing “this CGI masterstroke on your laptop is bound to stir up as much wonder as something you’d find hanging in a hushed room somewhere”:
The stunning three-and-a-half minute video above reveals the incredible detail in Farkas’s re-creation of Benczúr Gyula’s painting–and also transcends it. The video itself is a living painting, using subtle camera movements to let the viewers take in the true depth of field each figure in it possesses. Unlike the recent paintings we’ve seen with added movement, all that really moves here are tendrils of smoke that further clarify the spatial texture.
“This was my first time re-creating a painting, and the cause is a bit sentimental,” Farkas tells us. It started as a challenge from his wife. She dared Farkas to make a full 3-D version of a classic painting they’d seen in a booklet on holiday, and the Hungarian artist decided on using Gyula’s painting, which depicts Budapest’s recapture as Ottoman forces invade. After analyzing the painting and figuring out the character positions in the 3-D space, he had to create digital models for every person, animal, and object that appears in the image. By the time he finished texturing and planar projection, the image required 8.5 million polygons to support it.
Farkas documents the 10-week-long process of making the video here.
The Dish 
