One of the most significant steps in the development of Blender: GPU-Raytracing (Cycles) has been integrated! It uses a completely new shader system and is still in development, only CUDA is fully supported. Cycles features Global Illumination, realistic distortion and much faster rendering! Some features like billboards as particles or just unlit materials are not supported so far but it is very awesome i can tell

We are using it at university for a small blender movie project:
Order of the Maya on Facebook

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