Is this the current favored technique?
Background: Natural or man made (Color, texture, pattern)
Judging Distance to camera: Visible texture, Atmospheric diffusion
Judging distance to background: Shading, lighting
Texture: Metallic - shiny, machine scraped texture, silvery or coppery. Particulates? Fibrous?
Big or small: Diffusion, visible texture pattern, lighting/shading, blurred close-up effect, using logic relative to size of background
Man Made: Perfect/straight lines + Metallic. Perfect curved surface
It seems like judging scale and distance is the very first step to determining what it is you're looking at. And it seems the best way to do that is to analyze diffusion, texture, camera effects (Blurring), and reasoning out the distance of the background and the object.
Is this currently done?
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