No you don&#x27;t have tons of artists and modelers making light maps etc, they are in 99% of the cases made automatically depending on the engine and modeling software you use you can render objects using what ever method you want in non-real time including raytracing and the software can generate things like specular and shadow maps.<p>&gt;Just point the magic gizmo at your geometry and &quot;poof&quot; perfectly lit scene.<p>There are plenty of global illumination models that do not require doing full path tracing e.g. Radiosity <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Radiosity_(computer_graphics)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Radiosity_(computer_graphics)</a> which are much more efficient than ray tracing (even on dedicated RT hardware fyi) while resulting in pretty much an identical image, path tracing also works pretty damn well.
One of the main reasons that these aren&#x27;t use isn&#x27;t because the current hardware isn&#x27;t fast enough but because the resulting image just doesn&#x27;t look right because of various factors and has to be then highly adjusted to increase it&#x27;s dynamic range.
Global illumination creates brilliant results when your eye perceive it as &quot;real&quot; illumination like for example when sitting in a dark cinema when the only light source is the light bouncing from the screen which means your eyes only adjust to the brightness level of various areas in the screen which allows it to maintain relatively high dynamic range even tho it&#x27;s pretty much uniformally lit.<p>With computer monitors this simply doesn&#x27;t work the monitor is most cases isn&#x27;t the brightest object in the room as you have both day light and indoor lighting. 
The monitor in most cases doesn&#x27;t take as nearly as much of your view as a movie screen does and modern cinema projection solutions can actually provide high dynamic range by having different luminosity levels for different parts of the screen while your monitor is lit by a single diffused light source.<p>This pretty much means when you use global illumination you get much much lower contrast between lit and shadowed areas as well as overall darker lights and lighter shadows. 
Sure the scene is universally lit but it just doesn&#x27;t look like what people expect partially because they are used to direct illumination as it has been mostly used (with a few exceptions mostly due to the issues brought up here) for the past 20 years of real time 3D graphics.<p>So when you do use global illumination models (doesn&#x27;t matter if they are precomputed like Valve&#x27;s implementation of Radiosity, DICE&#x27;s real time RS, or Nvidia&#x27;s Gameworks Path Tracing) you either get a really washed out look or you have to tweak the hell out of it during post processing to give it a more stylized look.<p>And again Ray Tracing doesn&#x27;t save you from shaders you still need to write the same material shaders as you do today some of them might be slightly simplified if you are doing various things like fetching different specular&#x2F;reflection maps based on the viewport or scene composition etc. But overall you will still have the same shaders that make one door look like glass while the other like wood because it&#x27;s silly to have to make 2 doors when you can just adjust a flag in a shader.