>> Huh. I didn't even know Blender had a rendering engine... I thought it
>> was just a modeller?
>
> It's a complete graphical studio, it also got animation and rigging tools,
> sculpting and painting, a video editor, physics, fluid and particle simulators
> etc.

Well there you are then...

>>> If your gpu is a new nvidia, it can run on it,
>>> if not, just cpu.  But it's rather fast even on my humble dual-core at work, so
>>> should do just fine on yours.
>>
>> nVidia GeForce 260 GTX. Is that new enough?
>
> I meant that it's CUDA-based.  Should work.

I believe the 200 series is supposed to be the first release to support 
CUDA. Having said that, I have repeatedly tried to make CUDA-enabled 
applications work, with no success. Perhaps it will work under Windows 
7, but it never worked with Windows XP...

> You can find blender builds with Cycles here:

Isn't it in the main build yet?

> Here's a nice test scene:

Nice scene is nice. But I shudder to think how many decades it would 
take on a twenty-PC render cluster...

>> Bitmap textures have the advantage that if you want wood, you can just
>> point a camera at a physical plank of wood, and you're done. It has the
>> obvious disadvantage that it takes up gigabytes of storage, and looks
>> blurry as hell.
>
> Oh, certainly a gigabyte-worth bitmap wouldn't look blurry, unless looking at it
> through the microscope.

I meant more that once you have a few hundred of them, it's many GB of data.

>> POV-Ray has some really damned nice wood and stone textures. (I mean,
>> unless you're enough of a dendrologist or geologist to realise it's
>> scientifically inaccurate.) With the right noise generators and spatial
>> transformations, you ought to be able to make something really nice.
>> It's probably not even all that expensive either.
>
> No povray wood is good enough on close-ups, it simply lacks the grain.  Even
> with noise or combining with other texture...

This is not my experience.

If anything, it looks too uniform when viewed from too far away (and 
requires absurd amounts of AA to smooth out artefacts). From close up, 
it looks great! (Unless, again, you look at it from ridiculously close. 
In a game environment, you would of course optimise any textures to look 
good at the viewing distances you're actually using.)

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