I see that the image has some reflections on the ceramics and the glassware on the left. In terms of computation power, how many reflections are rendered. For example in some games you find mirrors facing each other and the computer isn't able to render the infinite reflections back and forth so where is an acceptable place to stop.

Similar to Adam, I wonder how graphics engines determine shadows and reflections. Will the engine behind processing them even be in the scope of our class, or will we simply be focusing on rendering pregiven textures?

the rendering reminds me a lot of Pixar shorts! Despite there being shadow, reflections, lighting, texture... it still feels like the scene is missing depth. similar to when painting, an artist must layer (undertones, accents, etc.) to achieve depth that just lighting, shadow, and reflection alone cant. so the render comes across more like a can-you-find-it book with each object having been rendered individually (a mug as one item a plate as another, a grape, etc.) then placed in a scene together. conceptual clarification: is the odd look because objects are uniformly experiencing RTX to an ideal extreme? what helps tone down the "doll house accessory" look the objects seem have?

Rendering techniques mimic the transmission of light, in order to display the scene in a more realistic and natural way

This rendering looks super cool, but I think most people would be able to recognize that something looks... off. It certainly isn't the detail involved with the image, but rather the subtle oddities like the grape furthest up in the picture - it just seems like its position and reflection aren't quite right. Is there a way to somehow communicate this issue in computer graphics, and develop an even better rendering with newer iterations? Does it require more computational power, or is it a different type of fix?

I wonder if ray tracing can capture the wave properties of light (for example, double slit experiment interference patterns).

Although this image is aesthetically pleasing, I wouldn’t say that it’s totally true to reality. For example, one of the glasses appears to reflect the grape as a perfect mirror image. Other details such as perfect white highlights on the desserts and the mugs appear almost too clean for real life. I would imagine that lighting derived from math assumes an ideal environment, leading to these incredibly neat results. I wonder if, to make an image appear truly photorealistic, one might have to go back in and dull some of the results down to give them the imperfections that make reality. Or could this be accomplished by further tweaking the math to damp the results?

How does ray tracing compare to other rendering techniques, such as rasterization, in terms of visual quality and computational demands? Furthermore, how has the recent developments of GPU impacted the computational efficiency and practical application of these rendering techniques in real-time environments, such as video games or VR? Is there any way we can combined these techniques and contribute to a balance of between high visual fidelity and performance requirements?

I would definitely agree with many of the other comments here, while this looks amazing, something about it just feels a little off, almost like the reflections are too perfect. I think one obvious one for me at least is the cup's reflection in the other cup, where it looks like a perfect reflection except a bit distorted whereas in reality I don't think a cup would be that reflective.

Since human-perceived photorealism is often the goal, I wonder if rendering methods are ever influenced by psychophysics studies? If we knew that humans were more/less sensitive to certain graphical properties, maybe we could optimize for the former and save computation on the latter.

Many people agree that something feels off about this photo, and I think one thing in particular that seems to be off in this picture are the grapes. They seem more like pebbles, and are missing some of the organic textures (ie. veins, surface imperfections, and a more matte surface). Also, the custard pastry and the chocolate cake seem too perfect, but I think these are probably things that can be fixed by a modeling/texturing artist.

I wonder what metrics are used to determine the photorealism of images. For instance, this image seems very photorealistic and nice to me at first glance, but it isn't immediately apparent why that is (lighting, surface material dynamics, positioning of objects, depth, etc.). Are there human surveys done for this kind of thing?