I''ve just found a few CG images, that look rather real

Image 1Image 2
Image 3

Personally I think we can do photorealistic rendering, it''s just the artist needs to spend a large amount of time working on the details, for example look at image 2, it wouldn''t look as realistic without the faded paint, the cracks in the concrete and other imperfections.

I think image 3 is a littel dodgy... The full sized version looks very unnatural.. the texture on the building looks unnatural. As do the background buildings.

Image 2 looks pretty nice. The individual components (car, building, cobbles) look pretty good, but it looks somewhat pasted together... especially the tree (although apart from the tree.. it could be a photo composite).

As for Image 1... it does look very realistic, but A few points. Again, it''s a very small portion of a scene... which in general feels more convincing as we expect less "fine" details on relatively small objects (ie far less work from an artists point of view). Also, I think it make be photo textured. There is nothing inherantly wrong with photo texturing... but what is the point of photorealistic rendering if you can only make images of real scenes/objects? I mean that might be fun.. but the real reason to obtain (IMO) photorealism in games, is to allow UNREAL scenes and environemts appear totally realistic.