[tizzdogg]

I work in film vfx, and if you think we dont compare our rendered images to real photographs and video constantly, then you dont really know how modern graphics are produced. We shoot reference for everything, and use things like gonioreflectometers to sample real world BSDFs. Yes, lighting models are always necessarily simplified from the real world physics. But the thing is that 99% of the time that doesnt matter, because most common types of surfaces are able to be reproduced accurately enough to fool the majority of people. I would wager that most of the CG things you see these days on TV or in movies you have no idea was CG.. it's only the bad stuff (or obviously impossible) that stands out.

I actually am a bit confused what you are arguing here.. all of these problems you're mentioning have been well-understood by graphics researchers for the past couple decades.

[sillysaurus3]

The main point was that film isn't interested in exact photorealism. As you said, it doesn't matter, because the simplified models are good enough. Therefore it's unlikely that the film industry will be the first to produce a fully computer-generated video that will be indistinguishable from a camcorder capture.

The reason most of the CG you see in TV or movies looks very good is because they take place within real video. We're not looking at a completely CG scene -- it's mixed with video from the real world. And that's a perfectly valid technique, but my comment was talking about 100% CG.

A secondary point re: the film industry is that artists must necessarily retain control of the art pipeline in order to create scenes that advance the plot. That requires the art pipeline to be flexible. The more flexible your art pipeline, the more productive your studio is. Yet that flexibility is precisely opposite to realism. Obviously, the more realistic a purely CG scene looks, the less flexibility you get, otherwise it wouldn't appear real; hence the argument that the vfx industry won't be the ones to produce the elusive fully-CG fully-realistic video. (It doesn't make financial sense for them to do so, if nothing else.)

[tizzdogg]

Again, I would wager that you have seen many, many shots on TV and in movies which were fully, 100% CG already. You just didn't notice because they really were indistinguishable. We've definitely already crossed that boundary in many areas, and the main things which still stand out is just bad work.