The field of Computer Graphics has seen tremendous developments and recent years brought us closer to reproducing reality. Nonetheless, when comparing to the real world, the difference can be striking, especially, for real-time rendering. In this talk, we will examine techniques towards increasing the realism of virtual environments. Our focus will lie on volumetric representations as they are very general and able to encode highly-detailed scenes. While they  tend to suffer from high memory demands, we will show that recent algorithms help us to overcome this hurdle. Furthermore, such representations are interesting for efficient light-transport computations and we will even cover real-time solutions for the simulation of participating media. The latter are particularly challenging to simulate and predicting the appearance of the rendered result is even difficult for experts. This latter point is particularly problematic when computer-graphics solutions are used by artists. To this extent, we present intuitive interfaces to design and influence the scene appearance. Our presentation will cover several techniques to bring us one step closer to making convincing virtual environments a reality.