Re:Hah... (Score 1)

Having talked with Ton R. a fair amount, I'm sure he was speaking of raytracing in general, and not specifically about Blender's Raytacer. That said there are several points to be made about this thread: 1) Yes, Raytracing is usable, if you want to make a still, or a 10 second animation. But in general, raytracing is not used in production environments because of the CPU cost. (Pixar only just added selective raytracing on "Finding Nemo"). Blender is an animation package, not a still image renderer, so it tends to favor speed. The fact that CPUs are 40x faster is just now making selective raytrace a viable option for people with out a 1000 CPU render farm. 2) The Raytracing in Blender is selective. Reflections and shadows can be raytraced. Everything else is z-buffered shading with shadow buffers. Again favoring speed. 3) This raytrace HAS NOT seen a release yet. It exists only in CVS for testing (and the "before and after images" have one serious flaw that has already been found and fixed). So this whole discussion is a bit premature.