eli5 how CGI lighting worked before Ray tracing.
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Ray-tracing has been around for a long time, but even today its not the only method used. In the past particular it was not practical to use ray-tracing for real time rendering (such as 3D games) because the time it took to compute the scene by ray-tracing was longer (usually far longer) than it would take to display it.
Instead of ray tracing various other techniques are used to simulate what the scene should be. For example rather than trace the rays of light coming from a source and calculating how they would eventually look when getting to the camera (ray tracing) a different approach would be for the objects surface to be rendered based on an algorithm that guesses what the surface would look like given a light source of X% intensity is coming from a different direction, and thus drawing the surface colors and shading of the object based on that. Its not as photo realistic but much faster.
There are many different rendering approaches and algorithms but all of them try to do the same thing, model how the various elements will interact and what the scene SHOULD look like given those elements. Ray tracing just happens to be very good because it more closely models how light works in reality, but its also computationally more difficult.
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