Hi, I don't know where to put this, since it's related to graphics programming and theory so I put it here.

I'm just wondering, what other features do we really need for photorealistic real-time rendering that may not be currently possible?

I mean, right now current graphics has offered many features that can give us photorealistic stuff possible in real-time, like real-time lighting, real-time shadows, bokeh, bloom, HDR, tessellation, and more, all in one, running in current high-end graphic cards. It was totally not like back in 2000 where things like real-time shadows and post-processing were new and amazing, also hackish light maps, etc..

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

Also worth mentioning that current "photorealistic" graphics aren't photorealistic, but are in fact approximations of real light behavior. For example, modern depth of field is only a loose approximation of the real phenomenon. Bloom isn't realistic, but just a loose approximation of atmosperic scattering of intense light. Shadows still aren't photorealistic, because real light sources aren't point lights or infinite planes, reflection and refraction are still just rough approximations, and so on and so forth. Heck, even the current RGB lighting paradigm is only a very loose approximation of the way colored light interacts with colored surfaces.

Furthermore, there's more to photorealism than simply modelling the behavior of light properly. For example, cloth and fiber simulation are still too computationally expensive to be done globally, so real-time clothing and hair don't move properly. Current real-time model animation techniques generally don't model the flexing of muscles under the skin - in fact, most forms of elastic deformation aren't generally modelled.

In other words, true photorealistic real-time rendering is still much further away than most people think.

Thanks for the replies,

Just wondering like is there anything else that is general we don't have here? I mean, I saw this video,

, and I am just assuming that if the filmmakers finally dare to use real-time engine like that combined with real world commercially, it means that all the stuff we need is probably pretty much complete.

What do you think? Is it? or is it not? are there features that are still missing to reach the result of that video? or is just a matter of hardware power now? if yes, in terms of gaming, how long do you think that games that aims to be realistic could finally dare to deliver in such results that user can play with current graphic trends?

I am just assuming that if the filmmakers finally dare to use real-time engine like that combined with real world commercially

That's not quite how I would read that statement. Film makers already use a lot of real-time tools, which are very similar to their games counterparts (motion capture, scene previewing, etc), but the final production step will typically use an incredibly time-consuming offline renderer, at a much higher quality than we can possibly drive in real-time.

Yeah I probably wasn't clear, what I mean by using real-time engine is by eliminating that time-consuming offline rendering process. But just by judging from a proposal video like that I may be wrong though. Thanks for the enlightenment.