Few hacks yes, less painful I have to disagree with. It is the present and of course the future, but what I have seen is that the hacks shift to do anything possible to reduce noise, and the artist's time shifts to doing whatever they can do deal with noise. It never ends up being 'fire and forget' because renders end up either overkill on cpu time or with noise somewhere in the image.
Forward raytracing as it currently stands is awful to use at the moment on a large scale for final motioned blurred images that can be sold to a client, but because it is simpler it is still better than alternatives. That is because getting the same results out of (REYES) renderman was something left to a handful of gurus and fanatics.
Now we have a state where renders take 8 hours per frame per character per pass but people still like it better. So be it, but that is still very painful.
Forward raytracing as it currently stands is awful to use at the moment on a large scale for final motioned blurred images that can be sold to a client, but because it is simpler it is still better than alternatives. That is because getting the same results out of (REYES) renderman was something left to a handful of gurus and fanatics.
Now we have a state where renders take 8 hours per frame per character per pass but people still like it better. So be it, but that is still very painful.