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Comment by zdfjkhiuj | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure it's fair to describe those as hacks. Those techniques are also used for animated movies, which take many CPU-years to render. Those "hacks" are used even when artist have huge amounts of hardware, no real-time constraints, and need extremely high quality.

Techniques other than raytracing have an artistic place, not merely a pragmatic one.

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Aren't animated movies pretty much universally ray traced?

No-ish:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar_RenderMan

These days they're pretty much 100% path-traced. But most animated films out there in the history of 3d animation were rasterized.

The edit window has passed so I'll reply to my own comment with a nifty tidbit. The early days of animated films were particularly fun to watch as someone with a background in computer science, as it was a one upmanship competition between the major animation studios (Pixar and Dreamworks) on technology. Monster's Inc had hair. Shrek had a scene with physically-realistic caustic effects of poured milk (really, go watch it--there's an entirely gratuitous scene where a glass of milk is poured to show that they can. milk as a semi-translucent non-homogenous liquid is VERY hard to render as it turns out.) Finding Nemo had lots of water effects, etc.

The challenge of all of this was doing it using rasterization techniques, or integrating more realistic techniques using path tracing into a standard rasterization pipeline in a way that didn't kill performance. But now render farms a big enough and technology has advanced far enough that they can just path-trace everything.

Pixar didn't use ray tracing much until 2013 with Monster's University.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/6/21/4446606/how-pixar-changed...

Nowadays ray tracing is common, but as recently as five years ago it was rare. Not all high-quality animation is ray traced.

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