I got one of the builds off of GraphicAll and have been playing with the Cycles renderer, which is due to be in trunk by December for Blender 2.61 release.

At first, I wasn't going to play with Cycles until came in an official release, but since we're getting close to December and Andrew Price just made a GREAT introductory video on Cycles, I felt like playing!

I created a simple scene and let it cook for awhile. I think the results look quite photographic. Cycles handles light much more realistically.

It's in the plan that Cycles replaces the internal renderer currently in Blender, so the main change will be in setting up materials. If you have a good graphics card (GPU), then you'll get relatively quick renders. (for a non-biased renderer) Without the good graphics card, all has to be calculated with the CPU and will be relatively slow.

At first I didn't like the fuzzy, slowly evolving images as it is rendering, but now, I guess it has grown on me. With a few passes, you have a good idea of how the scene is looking, there's just a lot of noise. Give it a bit of time to clean it up and I think it works quite well.

Here is the simple scene, rendered in 500 passes...

Click image for larger version.  Name: CyclesTestRend_.jpg  Views: 221  Size: 131.6 KB  ID: 84923

Peace

James