While not so much Blender related, the Aqsis developers have merged the point based GI code into the trunk. This means that anyone who can build the renderer can now work with global illumination, something that has been wished by many for years. Since the devs are working closely with Blender users and developers I figured it would be fitting to mention it in this section of CGTalk.
http://www.blendertorenderman.org/2011/08/aqsis-18-sneak-peek.html
I rendered this example scene yesterday to test the latest code, though it did take some time to figure out just what the hell I was trying to do. After some false starts and confusion, the final beauty pass rendered and I just sat at my desk with my mouth open thinking “Wow! That looks pretty damn good!”. While just a simple Cornell box, just seeing Aqsis do GI rendering in front of my eyes was neat.
This is a huge step forward in the realm of open source visual effects, the project is growing up (Aqsis has been around for 10 years now as of this year) and over the past couple of years the link between Blender and Aqsis is growing tighter, all via RIBMosaic. There is still much work to be done but at least now we have some GI to play with.