Not in an ideal world. Ray tracing is how light actually works in real life. Everything we do with global illumination right now is a compromised workaround, since doing a lifelike amount of ray tracing in real time, at reasonable framerates, is still to much for our hardware.
Nothing about 3D animation is ideal. It’s all about reasonable approximations. Needing to build better GPUs to support tracing individual photons is insane when you could just slightly increase ambient lighting in the area of a light source.
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there’s more to dynamic global illumination than just ray tracing
Not in an ideal world. Ray tracing is how light actually works in real life. Everything we do with global illumination right now is a compromised workaround, since doing a lifelike amount of ray tracing in real time, at reasonable framerates, is still to much for our hardware.
Nothing about 3D animation is ideal. It’s all about reasonable approximations. Needing to build better GPUs to support tracing individual photons is insane when you could just slightly increase ambient lighting in the area of a light source.
The current flashlight implementation is a reasonable approximation, when the rest of the map is properly lit with very dim light.