I don't think this is true at all. I've been experimenting with a physical sky / atmosphere modeling, and it really seems that the most physically accurate sky is the most beautiful. I think this applies more generally to all light and shadows, and all natural effects which people perceive as beautiful, and at the same time difficult / expensive to recreate on a computer.

I don't know, I was very happy when I discovered what Radiance can do with what you give it. I hear people get very good looking rendering with Blender, but my brain doesn't work like that (anymore?). Point being that not everything is about games and looking good, we need reliable tools to render synthetic scenes to assess a lot of non-game related things, like quality of lighting in architecture before erecting a skyscraper or buying a house etc. To that end, every bit of knowledge like the author seems be focused on, helps. I absolutely relate to the problem with "faking" things. Even developers of Unreal engine had acknowledged -- all too late, as it is -- that it's _light_ that most affects our perception of "realism". That and materials, which is why they had some sort of field trip to Iceland taking raw photos of rocks they could add to their materials library.

Another problem with looking good is that it's a) subjective (since it has no real or objective reference point, really) and b) it quickly goes stale once something else looks "better". Just look at Doom. It looked good in 1993, everyone would agree on that. It's not realistic, never was realistic and will certainly never be realistic unless you take a particular cocktail of drugs, I guess.

Oh my! Agree 100%. Tangentially, I love games without motion blur, with perfect and unrealistic graphics, and they happen to need much less intensive graphics. Also, animations with intentionally unrealistic dynamics and appearances that are well thought and go well with their invisible (to my non-artist eyes) contribution to the story. Not a big fan of extreme depiction of emotions in some styles of anime or cartoons though, to be clear.

I was excited when seeing things that are wonderfully realistic, but just as a sign of how far we have gone in computer graphics.

Tangential, but sometimes real images can also seem unreal. I remember seeing a photo of Earth and the Moon with the Moon on the foreground that looked like a bad CGI. But it was actually a photograph taken by a space probe. Or, one can think about those photos of the Apollo lunar module that looked "wrong" (and probably helped some conspiracy theories spread), but were obviously correct - just there's no atmosphere to speak of on the Moon, so no light scattering etc. That said often, space images actually use "false colors" [1]

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-the-colors-in...

I think there’s a value in realism, ARC Raiders is one of my favorite games right now and it reminds of of movies like Stalker or The Shape of Water, movies that show old run down buildings and industrial complexes in their full glory, paint flaking, water in the wrong place, it’s just fantastic. It really sells me on being in a once busy space that’s been abandoned and fallen from its former glory.

Not only look good, but also to be informative. His photos demonstrate the exact problem: Without the lighting hack you can have a 90° angle with almost no visible line, if the two surfaces are evenly lit. That's important visual information you've just left out.

As a player, I'd rather compromise realistic rendering in order to be able to see the contours of things.

> most of reality is pretty dull looking!

This is extremely untrue. It may be true that you spend most of your time in a dull-looking office or apartment, but most of reality -- at least here on Earth -- is quite visually interesting, and games are usually placed in visually interesting environments rather than set entirely within an office or apartment.

Beyond that, I would argue that the entire point of realism is not looking good (although it can look good), but rather immersion. The intent is to transport you to another world and make you feel like you're actually inside the scene. If your goal isn't to do that, then there's no need to bother with realism at all, and you can instead opt for highly stylized graphics that are intentionally designed to maximize aesthetically pleasing appearance and gameplay readability.

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