It concerns what has happened to the people involved. When they try to mathematically simulate lighting they've been motivated to go art museums. When they try to mathematically simulate trees and clouds they've been motivated to actually go out and look at nature. Now, consider the artists and designers. They now wallow in operating system version numbers and file format conversion programs.
Many designers write their own programs to produce unique effects.
And I think that most of them have come to appreciate that mathematical equations can stand for geometric shapes. And that mathematics can be as beautiful as sculpture. I think that the most important result of the computer graphics revolution is that it has helped heal the gulf between Art and Science. I spent my time developing the tools of computer graphics. So for the past 12 years I have been using tools rather than building them.