As an example, look carefully at the bone harpoon (Fig. 10). The shaft is a simple cylinder, but the head looks quite realistic and organic. In fact it was made from one cylinder and six boxes. A cylinder was created that had 14 segments, and one box was created that had each face divided into nine squares. The box was then shaped to roughly look like one of the barbs on the harpoon, and then smoothed out to look more organic. It was then duplicated five times, and each modified box was then welded to the tube. The resulting model was smoothed further to give it the final look.  What makes the harpoon look more realistic though is the texture, which was in fact taken from the tusk of an elephant!

Fig. 10

With more modern man-made objects we still have to be careful not to fall into the trap of expecting them all to be EXACTLY the same. Even mass produced items have minor imperfections which the human eye will pick up on. Computers are wonderful for producing perfect lines and edges…however no such thing exists in the world, and people will notice that something is wrong with an image if those perfect lines exist. Many people have seen computer generated images and immediately know the for what they are. This is because the artist, modeller, animator or renderer has not taken the time to remove the perfections (as apposed to removing the Imperfections!) and make the item more natural.