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2 points: 1. "Take a picture and make it look right" is exactly what people have done for things like POVRay since at least the 90s. I can't find it now, but at one point someone set up a glass ball on a checkerboard and used a point light and a camera to confirm the diffraction and distortion models were correct because someone claimed they didn't look right or were doing the wrong thing. The math that's there for rays, shapes, diffraction, diffusion, caustics, etc. is accurate, and necessary but not sufficient. Which brings me to 2. CG realism has generally hit the Uncanny Valley by now. It's so close to real that we think "that's pretty good", but it's far enough away that we still know "something's wrong". It's the difference between a dummy, a corpse and a live person. A couple of examples I remember from the past decade are laser + milk and better skin rendering on one of the NVIDIA demos a while back. There wasn't (isn't?) a good model to simulate the diffraction and subsequent diffusion of a laser shining into a glass of milk. Actual lasers with actual milk don't do the things we expect of modeled lasers in simulated milk. Some component is missing, but all the existing math is right for lots of other cases. The NVIDIA skin thing was adding 3 or 4 layers to an existing model to simulate subsurface scattering and reflection that happens in skin, vs old models that treat skin as paint. The old stuff was right, just not enough. All of that aside, there are decent photorealistic rendering options for some materials today, but at the cost of CPU hours of render time. If you can do better then please do, even if it's just for one material or one physics action. |