All the time. I think the first time I saw this kind of invisible CGI work done was on Contact, and it blew my mind. Obviously there’s lots of fakey stuff in that movie, but they used CG in virtually every scene, just to tweak lighting, add atmospheric effects, fix hair, etc. And that was in 1997. I’m sure it’s even more prevalent now.
But these days it’s honestly just way cheaper to use CG than it is to do things “for real”. Check out this FX breakdown of scenes from Deadpool: virtually everything is CG, but you’d never know. That movie was made “on the cheap” – can you imagine how much it would cost to rent a section of freeway and stage this scene with actual actors? But this is a movie directed by an animator, so he knows how to stage things and not make it look fake.
https://vimeo.com/159011768
