This is an enormous leap. Texturing and lighting are two very hard problems in CGI. Realistic lighting using raytracing requires a lot of radiosity passes, whic

This is an enormous leap. Texturing and lighting are two very hard problems in CGI. Realistic lighting using raytracing requires a lot of radiosity passes, which means adjusting lighting of each surface to account for each ray of light bouncing from surface to surface to surface to surface like a 3D billiard ball, more bounces computed yields better results but there’s computational limits to the number of reflections per ray, and many parameters and formulas to choose from each with its own trade offs. Texturing and shader pipelines is another matrix of trade offs to get a good-enough result. Instead of all of that complexity, applying ML this way cleverly hops over the most difficult parts to a really impressive result. Some don’t want games to look this way. Nonetheless this technique can be applied to give games and movies a different look that would very hard to acheive by standard rendering pipelines, and it doesn’t have to look washed out like this example, that’s all based on the training data set and how much this ML lighting and texturing is blended into the scene, and that’s another creative choice. I can imagine filmmakers wanting to adjust CG lighting and texturing of a scene using a training data set from old TV shows to make a convincing reboot of a classic TV series, or new series done in that style.