As mentioned earlier in the section on rendering, it is possible to create highly realistic virtual worlds with precomputed lighting effects, shadows and reflections that can be navigated in real time using software such as Lightscape to replace geometry and textures with precoloured geometry. The result is a model with only ambient light and geometry (with lots of polygons) and no textures.

A "poor man's" variant of this (to get a ray-traced look) is to use a 3D modelling package to ray-trace surfaces and then use Photoshop to create textures using the ray-traced surfaces. The disadvantage of this approach is that most graphics cards have fairly limited texture memory.

A screenshot of a VRML model with precoloured geometry (calculated using Lightscape):