When Laa-Yosh creates a photorealistic cutscene, he's adding photographic limits that our eyes don't have, and the results are damned impressive.
Just to be correct here, I don't create scenes
I model characters as production work, and create face rigs, but most of my time is spent supervising my team - planning, scheduling and checking tasks, giving feedback and support, and communicating with the other departments.
Building a scene usually goes like this:
- director and his team put together a rough animatic scene with placeholder assets and animation but mostly final cameras
- shot TDs build the scene with final assets, trying to keep as much animation from the animatic as possible, and break it down into rendering layers
- animators do several passes on everything that moves
- in the mean time the asset team builds characters, sets, props, adds hair and shaders
- riggers run cloth and hair sims and cache out the results, then fix collisions and intersections and bad deformations and such
- FX guys work in parallel to do their particle and other stuff and either they render it out or (for stuff like water) cache out the results and transfer it into Maya
- compositors light the scene, render out layers into pre-defined passes (close to what a G-buffer is), project matte paintings to geometry where necessary, then put it all together and adjust lots of stuff like speculars, SSS layer intensities, add various lens effects, grade colors etc.
So there's a reason why I try to always indicate that our stuff is a team effort
Game stuff is actually getting closer and closer to the above, except there's no caching for FX and sims, everything has to be done on the fly and thus it cannot be fixed or tweaked.