"This is an unpopular opinion, but nobody knows how to make anything look real."
Unpopular? By whom? Computer graphics is a crafty bag of tricks sprinkled on top of very concrete linear algebra and computational geometry.
That said, it's actually hard to create appealing images just in plain old photography, so anyone thinking computer graphics would facilitate any artistic aspects is in for disappointment.
The math needs to work, but you need artistic talents to make anything look good/real.
Unpopular? By whom? Computer graphics is a crafty bag of tricks sprinkled on top of very concrete linear algebra and computational geometry.
That said, it's actually hard to create appealing images just in plain old photography, so anyone thinking computer graphics would facilitate any artistic aspects is in for disappointment.
The math needs to work, but you need artistic talents to make anything look good/real.