Except that even with ray tracing, you're still going to have to construct "fake" lighting setups to get something that looks aesthetically pleasing, just as is the case in real life:
If anything ray tracing will only increase the demands for more realistic, cinematic and ultimately more time and complex consuming lighting setups.
I do not see that being the case at all. It makes lighting scenes arbitrary because you are not spending oodles of time tweaking shadow map bias, making sure X amount of shadow res is available for a light, making sure the image probe lines up, and then having to place fill lights in scenes when you do not like how the real time plus ibl fills out the scene, or spending the hours for lighting to build, or....
Your example of how a movie lights certain scenes ^^ is really only relevant for a cutscene creation. A gameplay scene cannot, and will not have 85 watt bulbs falling around character heads to make sure the back side of them is lit properly.
And even then, cutscenes with rasterisation involve tons of iteration and figedting for lighting not because of artistic reasons, but because specific engine features have to be tweaked to make sure things work specifically only for cutscenes instead of relying on a unified simulation.
Lighting a scene in rasterisation requires you to think in abstracted terms and not thinking about how light actually works. Lighting a scene with ray traced lighting is using everyday logic and requires a lot less downtime and specific per-case workarounds.
arstechnica.com
