Hi!

I personally think that images should be pleasing to me; to the extent they
are not, maybe I can try to figure out why.  One possible reason sometimes
is a lack of "realism" -- for me this usually doesn't mean that an object is
too clean but rather that it just looks wrong and that fact sticks out when
I look at an image -- interfering with my pleasure at viewing the image.
Unfortunately, what strikes me as "wrong" might not strike other people that
way.

My personal favorite thing about raytracing is that it offers the
possibility of "hyper-realism" -- the ability to show objects not just as
they actually are, but as they can be.  So a detailed but
dirt-and-blemish-free picture of a telephone can be quite beautiful to me if
it communicates the "essence" of the telephone.  Perhaps in another context
it may be more beautiful with scratches and dirty buttons.  Even the dirt
has an essence that can be communicated with more or less "realism".

Things like photon maps and the caustics they can present are useful because
the caustics in an image of a glass of wine may be an important part of
communicating the essence of that wine glass, enhancing the beauty of the
image.

Using POV to do truly photorealistic images is a clear-cut and interesting
challenge, but aesthetically I'm not sure that duplicating one expressive
medium with another really takes advantage of the potential of that medium.

derek

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