It’s finally here, what you all been waiting for (some of you perhaps not knowingly)! A few months ago we were preparing for the final school project for our last year. A few of us teamed up determined to make a game – and made a game we did indeed.
Research Station 09 in deep space
Find out more and try it out yourself!
This is cool, you got to see this! The pain of endless render times will soon be history. Companies around the world is working hard to develop the future of rendering. And that is GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) accelerated real-time rendering of ray traced photorealistic renderings! So instead of waiting two hours, you just have to wait two seconds, for a rendered result on your screen. As I mentioned there are quite a few companies working on this kind of technology out there, and here are some of them.
Shaderlight (ArtVPS)
http://www.artvps.com/content/shaderlight/what-is-shaderlight
V-Ray RT (Chaos Group)
http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/vrayrt.html
V-Ray has one solution that is already available I think. Check out this presentation from SIGGRAPH 2009; V-Ray RT GPU Rendering Demo
iray (mental images)
http://www.mentalimages.com/products/iray.html
mental images and nVidia joins forces to create a real-time renderer using the mental ray and CUDA (wiki) technology. It will be available in mental ray 3.8 and the current version (3ds max 2010) is 3.7 so perhaps the next release of 3ds max (sometime mid-2010, perhaps) will include the iray renderer, wouldn’t that be awesome! 
RealityServer (mental images & nVidia)
http://www.nvidia.com/object/realityserver.html
This is cool, nVidia is developing a server-side real-time rendering solution for web 3d. It utilizes the iray technology from mental images and renders the scene on a server and the image is then sent to all the client computers, all within just seconds! Check out a video presentation here: http://blogs.nvidia.com/ntersect/2009/12/nvidia-realityserver-30-now-shipping.html
Now wasn’t this really good news! 
Cheers mates!
Walt Disney Animation Studios are working on a new method for unwrapping polygon meshes, and the idea is to not unwrap them at all! They call it Ptex (Per-Face Texture Mapping) and it automatically unwraps all the quad faces of a subdivided mesh. This saves artist a lot of time when they don’t need to spend time with unwrapping, eliminating texture stretching and texture seams; it is all done automatically.
This technique has already been used Walt Disney Animation Studios in their production of Bolt (2008) and is supported in Pixar’s RenderMan renderer.
Here is a short abstract regarding this technique and you can read the entire paper here (.pdf). And here are some slides (.pdf) from EGSR. And here is a video demonstration form YouTube: