Rendering's Next Frontier

An excellent article by Ellen Wolff at millimeter magazine covers volumetric rendering advances, discusses the impact of GPU technology on offline rendering, has some nice quotes by my friend Christophe Hery, and ends with a conclusion I couldn't disagree more with -
"Despite the increasing complexity of rendered scenes, studios will undoubtedly retain their current expectations about how long it should take to render complex images. DD's Grant cites Blinn's Law, a longstanding maxim credited to CG pioneer Jim Blinn. “That law,” Grant says, “is that any renderer, no matter how fast processors get, will always take a couple of hours, because that's the tolerance level of artists."
Artists will want it interactive. Blinn's law is going to continue to apply, but the level of tolerance is going to be 30 Hz.
CG/rendering

Content by Nick Porcino (c) 1990-2011