Re: Discussion - Now I know why good 3D hentai isn't happening soon.
You don't need GI. You can directly light the model up and directly bake shadows into the texture or better yet into a map like ambient occlusion.
Something like Atelier Sophie can look really good with just some textures and some material shading on things like cloth and metal.
Current real-time global illumination combine CPU and GPU using baked patch graph to determine which object influence other. Render the scene without global illumination and let CPU transfer lighting calculation between object.
You don't need GI. You can directly light the model up and directly bake shadows into the texture or better yet into a map like ambient occlusion.
Something like Atelier Sophie can look really good with just some textures and some material shading on things like cloth and metal.