There's an entire field of research around realism in computer simulation and graphics. Raytracing is but one tool to solve the problems in this field. And there's at least one company who has monetized its efforts in this field: Pixar has been solving these problems for years. For quite some time, they've solved a handful of problems with each movie they made. Then, they release that knowledge in the newest version of Renderman. Now their products aren't cheap, nor is the educational material related to it, so I guess that complete "freedom" in the CGI space is quite a few years out, but I digress...