As the CG discipline has matured, researchers have moved from trying to discover fundamental drawing and rendering techniques, and have looked to increasing the complexity, and in some respects, the realism of synthetic images. Hardware has helped in this quest, but the algorithms that are embedded in hardware were first (usually) written and tested in software, later migrating to hardware.
One of the keys to complex realistic images is to represent the laws of nature and the physical environment in such a way that they are reasonably accurate and consistent, yet approximated in such a way as to allow reasonable computation speeds. CG researchers have often resorted to "tricks" that fool the observer into believing that the physical laws are represented ... the proof, as some maintain, is in the believability of the image, not necessarily in the accuracy of the representation.
Some of the more important attempts at realistic image synthesis are covered below. Many of the researchers are leaders in the field, and many have won awards for their contributions to the discipline.
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