[doktrin]

> If raytraced scenes were hard to control, why would every single animated movie be raytraced?

That's a bit of a stretch. Pixar didn't use ray-tracing until Cars [2006]. Even then, it was only applied for secondary effects.

It wasn't until Monsters University [2013] that they produced the majority of a movie using ray-tracing [1]. That's a recent development, IMHO.

[1] http://thisanimatedlife.blogspot.com/2013/05/pixars-chris-ho...

[1stop]

But that is because of hardware capability... i.e. computers weren't good enough for artists to work with... wasn't it?

I've been out of the 3D world for a while, but Ray tracing was the be-all-end-all/holy grail of 3d. It is simulating light... you can't do better than physics.

[chacham15]

Raytracing has its limitations, subsurface scattering for example.

[stcredzero]

But don't those go away with enough compute resources?

[leoc]

Pixar were late holdouts against non-physically-based rendering though, apparently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG4QuTe8aUw#t=4410