Virtual violin produces realistic sounds

Someone made a virtual car engine that was able to generate realistic sounds a few years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT-sKtR970

Bowed instruments are very cool to model because of the nonlinear slip of the bow against the string. A bit curious why bowing was not discussed or used in the example of a violin, just plucking. Do luthiers test violins more by plucking than bowing?

Not sure if that's news, Audio Modeling[1] has been doing that for quite a long time now. The big plus of physical modeling instead of sampling is disk size - instead of tens of GB of samples, you get a 15MB plugin.

It's much more difficult to use, though - you have to control lots of aspects of the simulation (using automation in DAW or MIDI controllers) to make it sound actually realistic.

OK I guess it seems like this is more of a tool for luthiers than for composers or music producers.

[1] https://audiomodeling.com/