If there's a generally static scene with just characters walking through it, does the render take advantage of rendering the static parts for the whole scene once, and then overlay and recompute the small differences caused by the moving things in each individual sub frame?
Or, alternatively what "class" of optimizations does something like that fall into?
Is rendering of video games more similar to rendering for movies, or for VFX?
What are some of physics "cheats" that look good enough but massively reduce compute intensity?
What are some interesting scaling laws about compute intensity / time versus parameters that the film director may have to choose between? "Director X, you can have <x> but that means to fit in the budget, we can't do <y>"
Can anyone point to a nice introduction to some of the basic compute-relevant techniques that rendering uses? Thanks!