I don't know if you guys know how fast path-tracing is becoming reality. It just needs a few more years (of GPU advancement) to get rid of the noise, watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKqxonOrl4Q
For art, next-generation photorealistic graphics will be 3D scanned and/or procedurally generated. Lots of work still (you can't scan cars or anything mechanical), but graphics could also be reused more often.
Yeah this is exactly what I was going to say and I was even about to post a Brigade engine video. LOL.
McClure kind of dismisses "ray tracing" offhand (and by implication/context, similar techniques like path tracing) with the premise that every texture would need to be manual developed by an artist.
The answer to that is as you mention 3d scanning and procedural generation.
There are quite a few path-tracing software (and even one or maybe a few hardware) efforts out there, and many 3d scanning companies.
I believe that the main thing that is holding these technologies back now is just people not knowing that they are realistic technologies, which keeps them from being mainstream. But once things enter the mainstream consciousness of engineers, you get an order of magnitude increase in the number of people working on them, starting with some of the existing working ideas and you start getting much more practical and inexpensive solutions.
I believe that within say 7 years Nvidia and ATI will either acquihire or build hardware themselves that makes real-time path-tracing, procedural generation, and real-time physics, convenient and efficient.
By the way, if you are interested in (realtime) ray tracing technologies, check out this forum: http://ompf2.com/
By procedural/scanned I meant mainly procedural that is based on 3D scanning (scans used for learning set), such as FaceGen http://www.facegen.com/ Lots of other stuff could be made this way, too.
The article is arguing in a different level. It says that reality is inherently artistically irrelevant, and this race to photorealism is a wild goose chase. You can't 3D scan Skyrim!
I get that, but path-tracing is realism, there's nothing to add or nothing to remove. It's a full optical simulation. Path-tracing is not about what 'effects' it can do, it's about speed, precision, and accuracy, and nothing else. That answers the technology question the article is talking about.
Another question was art and content. For that I will say that new tools will be developed that combine huge libraries of 3D scanned content and procedural generation. Artists are still needed for 'art direction', which is the part where he decides what general shapes and materials he wants, and basically traditionally models almost everything like houses etc. That is still a huge amount of work for games like Skyrim, but the end result will always be photorealistic, and it should not be the artist's job to care about how it looks anymore.
For art, next-generation photorealistic graphics will be 3D scanned and/or procedurally generated. Lots of work still (you can't scan cars or anything mechanical), but graphics could also be reused more often.