12-12-2005 15:11
All the pictures are realtime, that's the point. I'm in no way denying that there's effects that can't be achieved in realtime with current technology, but the overall quality of the visuals I consider to be catching up with what can be achieved in a prerendered image (a major factor in this is, I feel, the fact that we can generate imagery that's very close to reality now). A lot of the work that goes into it is in producing textures, cubemaps etc. that fake effects that raytracing calculates as you say, but if the only people that notice the flaws are those who are looking for them then it's doing it's job.

I'm not digging at you, just raising a point, but I don't really think the image you provided looks like a photograph of plastic fruit at all. It's quite clearly computer generated since it's lacking things that we are yet to simulate well but are necessary to give a sense that something is real such as subsurface scattering (that alone is holding back realisting rendering of skin hugely) and the lighting is just, well, wrong. Until computing power reaches a high enough level the best cgi is still going to need well produced textures and the like in order to look 'real', even when raytracing. A good example is how extra light sources that wouldn't be present in real life have to be added in order to fill in shadows that shouldn't be there.

At the end of the day it's what the final image looks like that is important rather than the technology that creates it. If a scene is static then a skilled enough painter given enough time could produce something just as realistic looking as the best software/hardware could generate.
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