This statement is someone who is throwing the full weight of his many years of CGI experience into this conclusion which as he states has fundamentally the reputation of not just himself but his business at stake. This shows the extent of the certainty with which Marc makes this statement and the also the belief that he has invested in this statement and his conclusion. It's not just an insignificant web-based business that Marc is the president of, for example his client list includes:

This is discussed and explained in detail further down on this page when because of these past & present clients a pro-Drone believer implies that Marc could be a government agent/has a hidden agenda/is tasked purely with debunking UFO images.

Aside from those who just say its a Hoax without substance, I have quite a bit of experience in these matters and I undertook an analysis of the photos and it took me all of 60 seconds to see that I was looking at a CG model.

The reason for the short determination?

I know where to look and now I will tell YOU where to look on such models. By way of background by the way, my degree was in Astronomy, and my business is creating Digital Models. So, after a while you can pick these things out rather easily.

Now, the reasons this is a clear and obvious hoax are numerous and I am sharing them with the people that have brought these photos to the public forefront, such as Coast to Coast and MUFON. Because I saw all of your comments, I will go through it a little to let you know what you are seeing here.

(I am talking about) the images on Coast to Coast which show this craft.
The link is: www.coasttocoastam.com/gen/page2022.html?theme=light

The 5th image down shows the render anomaly.

I am sorry but it is completely obvious that its a simple CG render done by a good but elementary CG Modeler, who has no lighting knowledge. Cant have one without the other to be successful, and he, was not.

The shadow is obviously a rendered shadow. You can clearly see small circular patches of darker shadow within the overall shadow. The shadow appears to be composed of 'pores' like on an orange as best I can describe. This appearance is directly the result of not using proper settings for the "radiosity" type rendering and is prevalent in multiple rendering packages.

To achieve a higher end result you need to have the light bounce more in your rendering to provide depth in the shadow.

Simply put the author made a very large blunder in his FIRST set of images, those where he was directly under the craft looking up from " close range '. There you can see artifacts in the shadows indicating that he used what is referred to as a 'light dome' or 'radiosity' or 'HDRI" to render the computer image. This manner of rendering very accurately in some cases reproduces the way an object lit by the Sun would look: There will be subtle light in the shaded areas, from reflected light in the sky or from the ground and the object takes on a far more REAL look.

He used this technique, BUT ... he did not use enough 'samples' during the render. What this means is that the light ray reflections falling on the model are calculated from every possible light source, be it reflection off of grass, or a wall or what have you.

The more samples, the better the overall result.

He used a pretty HIGH value but NOT high enough because in the shadows you can very clearly see characteristic mottling of the shadow which is due to too few samples.

So look in the shadows!

If it looks mottled in a patterned sort of way, almost a mathematical way, then its a rendering.

I clearly pointed out the obvious damning artifacts that show the object is a simple CG model, lit poorly and incorrectly and whose shadows give away the bad sampling for a 'radiosity" render. See my patterned shadow discussion in the above comments.

That was not the only thing.

The other items included light sources being wrong, the model is way too clear for its supposed size and distance, and in these latest images he REALLY goofed up big time with both light angles, and the fact that his photo shows a bright sunny day with the sun being just out of shot to the right, yet the object suffers NO near-sun effects ....

What are those?

Take a picture of something near the sun and you will see...

To get the darker shaded undersides correctly exposed, you have to overexpose the image and meter the camera for the shadows. He failed to do that and the telephone pole, rather than being overexposed as it should be, is perfectly fine.

Further, the object's bright areas are not overexposed to show the shaded areas and this is a huge problem.

As far as video?

I can tell you why there is no video.... Each FRAME of a radiosity render like this takes a very long time to render because of the calculations required for each light ray. Sometimes a radiosity rendering can take hours per FRAME. Sometimes minutes per FRAME. Since there are 24-30 frames per SECOND, a ten second video would be 300 frames perhaps rendering at one frame every say 45 minutes. He would tie up his computer(s) for 225 hours just for a 10 second video!

So THATS why you dont see one. In addition the author probably doesnt know HOW to create the proper atmospheric effects for an on-the-fly animation where currently for the still images he is probably doing additional work right now in a Photoshop type tool to add the finishing touches.

I am dumbfounded by anyone who believes this clear and obvious digital computer model is anything but what it is, a funny hoax. Even after the author admits its a hoax, you will say it is not a hoax...

For crying out loud, he started by modeling a BF Goodrich All Terrain Tire and got bored!!!

He smooth shifted, beveled and Nurnied. Those three things take about an hour in any reasonable 3D program. The whole model was probably an hour to build. Then he textured it and then he poorly lit it as I showed.

Another simple point if you need more obvious flaws...

If you look at the picture that shows the object on a very bright sunny day and its small in the shot, why is it that somehow the camera was able to show EVERY detail of the object and the telephone pole and the rest of the sky etc... The camera meter meters not on individual objects, but on zones.... Lets talk about that because there is one shot where the 'ship' is very bright in a very bright sky and the ship takes up only 4-6% of the shot, tiny in a vast sky....

So about that shot:

Had he SPOT metered on the ship, then the rest of the shot would be highly overexposed because the meter would make the shadowed area on the ship look good and to do that it would open up the iris and take perhaps a longer exposure.

Had he MATRIX metered then the ship which is only about 6% of the scene, would have been silhouetted just like when you take quickie photos at an airshow, as the sky is SO much brighter overall, it would stop down the camera.

Somehow, the buffoon decided he needed to BRIGHTEN the object in that bright sunny day image. What he did unthinkingly was seal his coffin.

The object would NOT have been bright as it was unless it was self luminous.

Regarding your arguments about the video... Having been a MUFON investigator, there is really very LITTLE video evidence when people see that extraordinary once in a lifetime UFO. Had that been the case here then the faker would have had a better shot of pulling this all off.

But this faker has decided that he can repeatedly go out and 'find it in a relatively short time'... And he claims to have done so and brought friends with him to see it... So now lets ask again why there is no video....

Cameras

Compression artifacts.

Reality is fleeting. Unless its on a film negative taken directly out of a camera after a multiple eyewitness account, it is hard to believe anything these days.

That said, I want to once again mention the reason why I am quite sure there is no video yet as several people mentioned it again. As I mentioned it takes a LONG time to render objects using this kind of light technique. Radiosity renders are among the longest you can make as are physical renderer images.

Further, I am CERTAIN he had to bring his images into Photoshop or a similar tool to add haze and any other additional tweaks to make it 'real'. On a frame by frame basis he would have to do this because he probably doesnt know the best way to create the atmospherics required for on the fly animation. Doing proper atmosphere DOES represent a whole new layer to creation of 3D models.

I have examined the model once again and see very elementary 3D tool usage on the model. For those fluent with the types of tools available in a typical 3D modeling program here are the ones he used.

The names are tailored to Cinema 4D but Lightwave, Maya, and other tools have similar tools:

1: Tube primitive object used as a baseline

2: Polygon manipulation tools:

a: Bevel

b: Smooth Shift

c: Knife and Cutting tools

d: Extrude

The model was created using the following SIMPLE and RUDIMENTARY objects and functions available in most reasonably good 3D Modeling programs.

The point being that he chose a UFO that is EASY to make in CG.

I made one of the long fins sticking out in 30 seconds, selecting polygons, beveling it out, tapering the tips, and softening the edges on the fin. I can imagine spending another 3-4 hours and getting something intriguing. And it would probably fool most people too. Not that I am this fantastic artist but keep in mind that the TOOLS available now make it so much easier to pull this off.

You are right about the camera conclusions too. As you know we just create our own cameras and set the lens effects etc... etc...

Oh yeah and Capitola is near Santa Cruz ... you know, that HIGHLY UNPOPULATED section of California ... No WONDER no one saw this thing! After all, the faker says he can find it after only 30 minutes..

Now for those who just simply want to believe, go ahead.
I cannot stop you. But dont let good science become the enemy.
Just realize we haven't found them yet.
But they are here, dont worry.

• Taken in a place with no name
• A simple reproduction of the fake Tahoe UFO...
• Total development time of this model: 1 hour 30 minutes.
• Textures were simple and no time taken to 'paint' any lettering or anything.
• Just a quickie for purposes of show and tell.

Atmosphere was STOCK and not altered to make it more real. I used default settings for Radiosity, added Environmental haze prior to rendering, and rendered for 18 minutes.

Don't understand George Noory. I told him it was a hoax from the get go. And thanks for the compliments. YOU got it. It was a quick proof of concept piece that goes far to show how easy this is to replicate. I can use Photoshop to add filters or use the animation program itself to add on the fly filters so it can be made to look like lousy video, or black and white film complete with streaks and artifacts from 'age' and so on. But for 90 minutes it gets the job done as you have said.

I use Cinema 4D although we have in my studio many different packages. The GI is just cinemas STOCK GI and not even HDRI ! Mental Ray will probably make yours look much better than mine! I understand the Radiosity issues ... had 'em, hated 'em.... Got past 'em! Oh and the falloff material would be brilliant here yes! Great idea!

I was thinking of a Fresnel which I think does a similar effect for the backlit material. That would make it look much more like a film/silver halide type image blend you might expect to see on a negative.

If you read, I stated that I spent 90 minutes off and on to create the model using elementary techniques available to the amateur. We do this for a living so my point was simply to show how much can be done using the simple basic tools that beginners use in 3D programs. That said, there was very little effort expended on this in fact so where you say "all the effort spent on this" it is directed at 90 minutes of work and stock textures, and no efforts other than defaults to make the GI sky.

I dont need to defend myself against the likes of you BUT ... I stated clearly some facts that you conveniently choose to overlook as they dont fit your case:

1: I clearly stated that I used 90 minutes of time to show what COULD be done in 90 minutes.

2: I clearly stated that I used ELEMENTARY CG techniques from our VAST arsenal and I DO mean VAST.

3: I clearly stated that I used STOCK textures and STOCK Global Illumination settings with NO changes to show the BASIC DEFAULT RESULTS obtainable. The sky in the other photos is a real photo, mine as stated is a simple 2 minute CG generated sky.

4: I clearly stated that I was NOT trying to reproduce these images but to show [which I successfully accomplished] the typical FIRST pass you can get from a reasonably good 3D tool.

5: I clearly stated that I was a MUFON investigator for a number of years and have been involved in many cases.

6: Maybe I have NOT been clear about something: I am a believer and have had a 3rd Kind encounter with surgical evidence that YOU dont have a prayer of ever getting out of me.

7: Maybe I have NOT been clear about something. We have done CG television documentaries for the Discovery Channel, A&E, and History channel. A FRACTION of what we do is publishable as we work for the NAVY most times.

I recognized a basic glaring flaw in the photos and called it out for what it was. ANYONE who has good experience in CG knew this was fake from the get go.

For you to sit and claim I was trying to make it sound like I equalled what I am sure was an effort of weeks on the faker's part in just 90 minutes is ludicrous and you simply needed to froth at the mouth and attack someone.

What makes you think I just jumped in here to render an opinion?

What makes you think I am NOT qualified to discuss this?

The California MUFON investigators contacted me and asked me to get involved in this case from my location here in Connecticut . Did they ask YOU to get involved?

I have been retained to do a fair number of UFO investigations with State Police, Airline pilots, and first hand witnesses in the general public. How many have YOU been retained to do?

You are an armchair attacker with nothing but an opinion. But, it gave me the opportunity to show a little more about my background that is helpful in this case so thank you.

In the 'more impressive set' of images on Coast to Coast, these are the images I was provided from the beginning of the investigation and which give away the CG nature of the object the most!

The image in particular that sealed its fate was image 5 from the top which is the closeup of the fin. At the far right of the image is a shadow and this is where the problem is located. If you took the time to read my analysis in the other forums then you know the issues with the shadows I discussed ad-nauseum. If you don't know then you have not fully informed yourself and are speaking from a far less knowledgeable

Again, since you obviously have NOT read my posts, you did NOT see how I dissected the CG nature of the image to the satisfaction of other investigators on this case, and illustrated how the render artifacts present in image 5 came to be. Perhaps it is simple. Perhaps you just did not see the OTHER discussion and if so you would be fine.

We were asked to provide not an AMATEUR opinion of this so called UFO, but a PROFESSIONAL opinion based on our experience that I tried to gently point out to you without you embarrassing yourself. But, as with many who just dont get a clue, you have indeed embarrassed yourself with your lack of knowledge of both who we are, and how CG is created.

Your challenge is silly. You repeatedly ignore my facts surrounding the creation of my image. You expected that I was TRYING to create a fully convincing image.

Wrong dude.

From the beginning when I stated I was going to show people what an initial stab could create these days in a 3D package [again, Mr informed, see the other thread I linked you too] I was creating the control image that shows you what the BASIC STARTING point would be for someone with a decent 3D tool. And you, feeling the froth in your mouth and the rabid need to attack decide to ignore the facts and just attack!!! Did you yell in glee as you wrote your words too? Did you feel like you were 'putting me in my place' too? Well goody for you. But you are not qualified to criticize me. You admitted yourself that you 'grew up with CG' but you do not create CG.

As I said, and you have reaffirmed again, you have no CG experience so you have no idea what to LOOK for in that photo. Saying that you 'know what computers are capable of" is a far cry from understanding undersampling rendering artifacts in a renderosity render. In the other discussion that I provided the link for to you, I discussed it and explain exactly what I firmly believe is the simple, obvious case with this hoax.

And how come no one has bothered to respond when I clearly provided information that said that at the time of the Tahoe sightings, on that crystal clear blue sky day, it was RAINING AND CLOUDY during those days!??!?!

I was only trying to show what a good 3D tool can produce on first pass.

Also it is not my fault if you are not CG savvy. I spot a CG fake and you say it looks real to you. Of course it does because you dont have the CG background to analyze the more difficult cases. Is it just because I say I have the background that you feel the need to contest it? Go ahead and contest it. I was asked by MUFON to analyze the imagery as I said. Why do they ask me? I guess because maybe I have certain experience that you dont? Maybe I was just a random survey caller. Yeah that must be it.

I am reminded of a quote by a Hollywood actress when she was asked what she thought of the special effects in Jurassic Park .
She said and I quote:

"It was incredible! I didnt know where the real dinosaurs left off and the special effects dinosaurs began!"...

Clearly she too has no CG background and probably no High School either actually to make such an inane comment. You of course are much smarter, just not CG savvy. And somehow you gauge my ability to judge the imagery by a further ability to reproduce it exactly if not better.

Had I spent the kind of time that he did on his FAKES which is what they are, then I would indeed have produced similar results. I already have been doing similar things for shows on underwater technologies for the History channel and Discovery. People thought they were watching video right down to sea snow trickling down in the lights of the 'camera'. Participating by invitation in an investigation and taking part in spirited discussion about it is what I can agree to provide. I do not have the time to do more than that. The CG model I have is actually enough as it is. I dont have to work on that at all. The only thing needed is to work on the atmosphere you know. Keep in mind that my atmosphere is ENTIRELY CG . His is a photo that he composited the model into. That already adds a tremendous dose of realism since 80% of the photo is real from the get go.

I also refer you back to the other picture in Flickr where we discuss the artifacts from the CG render. I think that you like RichardAkai here must not have read that or followed my posts there because what the two of you are saying indicate that you are re-asking questions for which I rendered opinions.

It is the considered opinion of myself and what appears to be many MUFON investigators that this is a hoax plain and simple. To those with no CG experience, let the aliens come/

IT WAS RAINING AT TAHOE ON MAY 5 2007 !!!!!!!!!

How could you pass that link to the weather site and tell me with a straight face that the weather was sunny???? The weather facts, richardakai, were provided to me by MUFON and you are wrong. If you look again, on your OWN link you can see that on 5/5 in particular for which you crow about the supposed cell phone time stamp, it was in fact RAINING at lake Tahoe on that very day and partly to mostly cloudy the remaining days! Your OWN link told you that but boy you really do see what you want to see dont you...

Had the FAKERS been more clever, they would have arranged the time stamp data to indicate a day that was clear but NOOOOOO they were too anxious to foist the hoax.

I said VAST arsenal once and once only. I simply cut and paste what he OUGHT to have seen already but obviously missed... I do like how you try to imply I say it every message by using the phrase 'over and over'... Uhhh once written, once copied for expedience in the context of the rest of the points I was making.

And if you have doubt about that arsenal then visit our web page and go to the CG section and read the list. It is already outdated. We now have upwards of 25 computers for rendering not 15 or so as it might say and we have spent many additional thousands on software for these purposes! There. You accuse of me of posturing? Well there you go. That was a genuine posture effort.

Oh and on the weather thing where you mention that because I sought weather information that it proves something? I am completely convinced this is a fake. I knew it from day one from the first moments of analyzing the image ... And now the BIG point you will conveniently ignore:

YOU are just pissed at me because you feel I am trying to make myself out to be someone who is somebody. If you even bothered to take the time, you would have noticed that I spent most of my time fending off attacks. So I get a little testy when fending off an attack. So what? You have a problem with that? I dont roll over and just take it. Maybe you do but I respond from a reasonable high road and drive my points out hard.

I did not seek any weather information at all. MUFON investigators provided it to ME .

By way of background, I am the president of FX Models, a company that does modelmaking both physical and digital. In the digital arena, we create very high end digital models and animations for people and illustrate magazines, do documentaries etc. So my 3D background runs back around 12 years or so all the way to the days of Imagine which I barely knew, and Ray Dream Studio.. Now we are in Cinema 4D for the last few years, Modo collectively for about 3 years or so, and Lightwave for 10 or so years. So that is the CG background... On the other side, I was formally schooled as an Astronomer [yes we really do exist] and spent many a night in a freezing observatory taking imagery of nearby stars. I taught it professionally, owned more telescopes than cars in my life, and have seen many of the strange and weird phenomena that the Universe can throw at you that defy logical explanation.

I have been following not so much the DRONE thread as it relates to the Drone Technology as that I believe has been shown quite adequately to be a neat imaginative story. I have been paying more attention to the analysis techniques that many of you have been using and this is where I wanted to weigh in and say that thanks to the readily available tools for creating 3D objects, we can recreate not just objects but entire environments. Some of you have done this to great effect actually, and I noticed how pole shadows were examined using this approach and as hard as the investigator's job is getting, we too have great tools to counter the hoaxers. One thing I wanted to mention though is something I shared with the MUFON crowd and think you should know this too.

In part of the talk I did I mentioned that the next generation of renderers is now readily available. These are called Physical Renderers for those who dont already know that. I am sure some of you know of these though... Products such as fryrender [always lower case... ] and Maxwell~Render are two that we use. With Maxwell for instance you put in for lack of a better term, lighting that is measured in watts. So you can put a pair of 60 watt bulbs in your scene light "fixture" that you create and render the scene which iteratively improves on the scene, calculating every photon, over time. If you let it got for a day, your image will look pretty darn good compared to if you let it go for an hour. Not only that, you get pretty much exactly what a pair of 60 watt bulbs would give you in a real world counterpart to your digital model room. One giveaway item on these renderers is a potentially grainy final image if you do not let it go long enough. But... using a product like Noiseware, you can remove the graininess algorithmically and this brings the very real possibility of images being presented to the investigator that are very real right down to the shadows within the shadows. This is something hard to achieve with normal Radiosity type renderings.

Anyway, I just came back from San Jose where I had been asked to do a talk on the Drones at the MUFON symposium. I have to say that the analyses I have seen here on this board are very well done. I too found 'exposure' inconsistencies with imagery and in addition found giveaway clues in the renderings that gave them away as renderings which I went into in detail. My talk focused on the Computer Generated image side of things, and picked apart the textures, the shadows mostly [which are all wrong in some images] and then the drone artifacts themselves.

Further, and more important perhaps than anything else, I reproduced the drone in our company's 3D tool of choice during the presentation, pointing out how it was created using very elementary 3D tools in most 3D apps. For instance I showed the long extensions, created with 3 or 4 mouseclicks using a tool called "bevel". These simple tools were used repeatedly to make what appeared to be a densely detailed model but was just tedious actually.

I too saw the Sun angle dilemma as well but time prevented me from going too far into it.

When it came to the "Antigrav" unit, the hoaxers I believe, really did themselves in because they used a classic CG setup called a "White room" or "showroom" and then rendered their digitally created 'artifacts' in this showroom with all of its attendant low settings for the Radiosity rendering they did.

The only problem with LMH's assessment is that she believes that the drones are real. I strongly believe that they are CG creations as many along with me have pointed out. So in the case of the drones, the "Isaac" character and the "CARET" thing are just cool back-story to a really neat sci-fi craft. Might make a great little short movie but it was all created to fool people and apparently it has worked. Linda is a great researcher but she cannot be held accountable for being fooled by this hoax. It was good enough to fool those with no graphic background but too simple to get past the graphic modellers who saw it for the simplistic easy to create craft that it is. In my MUFON talk in San Jose , I recreated it during my lecture to illustrate the elementary manner in which it was created using simple 3D tools available in most 3D applications.

In any case, just my 2 cents here...

Marc
FX Models

Source: Open Minds Forum

Marc's reply was as follows:

Wow... I apologize for the late discovery of this particular post and my now probably WAY too late response. But, by way of introduction here, I see that someone was raising a potential issue with my credibility since I do indeed do model work of various kinds, physical and digital, for some government agencies. I certainly understand and concede that my client list could cause suspicion.

But... one thing you need to do I believe is to put to bed the notion that all people associated with government are suspicious or disinformation specialists. I am flattered that you are bothered by my background in a way but only because in reviewing my own partial client list I said "Wow... I guess we HAVE done some pretty cool work!".

In any case, I harbor no ill will toward the author of that post because I can certainly understand the reaction. But here in a nutshell is some more background so you can see that I am indeed sincere.

1: I am an experiencer. I ended up on a two year odyssey to remove a sinus based 'thing' that was placed there during a night time visit by 'who knows who'. My case is documented and was the most frightening thing I have ever experienced. I am an in-shape, many years long Tae-Kwan-Do person who was completely and totally immobilized, unable to utilize any skillset to extricate myself from the situation. I was as awake as I am now. I could not talk, I could not move my EYES, I could not move, and my ears were 'shut off'. All I saw was peripheral movement of a 'creature' that ran a translucent wand in front of my face. The next morning when I awoke unable to breathe, I pushed off the pillow to discover it was SATURATED in blood. I felt like I was punched in the face. A visit to the Ear Nose and Throat doctor in Hartford CT some time later confirmed a large mass in my sinus that the Dr removed. He sent it to pathology for examination and ... it vanished. Pathology claimed they never received it and it was gone forever. I have no results. Budd Hopkins is a friend, and I will be seeing him soon in Manhattan to discuss some things.

2: I was a MUFON investigator for YEARS before I thought of starting my own model making business. So no, I was not investigating while serving my clients.

3:I discussed the Drone Hoax in a presentation that Jim Carrion asked me to do out in San Jose this past week or two ago and showed how a CG version of the drone could be easily created and why I felt strongly that the imagery was all hoaxed. I also examined the artifacts and deduced their CG nature as well. Someone who does disinformation I guess would do exactly what I did. But, the drone is a CG hoax. I am not the only one who said it, as Michael Naisbitt on this board also has done his independent analysis along with about 30 others on various boards and using high end tools as we use every day.

4: I do photo analysis for most of the states in the USA , and for various other countries. A misinformation person would not be able to carry this out too long before the 'truth' was known and his credibility ruined. You know how it is... The higher the profile the larger the target. Well, I say unequivocally on this board that I am not one such person and there is nothing anyone can find that would indicate this about me or my company. I have never spread disinformation and just stick to the science and the fact. Opinions are crafted from data that all can examine and data is from third party sources 100% of the time so far although I intend to do my own data collection at some point.

5: I just did a UFO Hunters spot while in San Jose and just returned from a Discovery Channel shoot, both of which were multiple days and involved photo analysis, witness interaction, and on camera reputation making/breaking [ha ha]. I do not say or do things that will damage not only my reputation but my company's. My company has found a military niche yes, but that is all it is.

So that is just some background. I respect opinions even contrary opinions to my own. I always try to see how the other opinion's reason for existence is based on something. What that 'something' is, is important to take note of and be mindful of so that rash judgment will not be delivered.

Thanks for the time all, and again sorry for my late response to this very old post but it needed to be said.

Marc D'Antonio
President
FX Models
www.fxmodels.com

Skeptic

"One who practices the method of suspended judgment,
engages in rational and dispassionate reasoning as exemplified by the scientific method,
shows willingness to consider alternative explanations without prejudice based on prior beliefs,
and who seeks out evidence and carefully scrutinizes its validity."