Octane Render
I came across a renderer called Octane and couldn't quite leave it alone, so Jan Henrik Hansen and I built a machine to feed it and gave up a weekend to find out how good it really was.
Octane, from Refractive Software, was a GPU renderer, which meant it lived and died on the hardware underneath it. We built a custom PC for the job and then spent two days throwing scenes at it: a car, a shark, a pair of shoes, a tangle of ribbons.
Everything here came straight out of the renderer. No post production, no retouching, no clever compositing. The only thing I did afterwards was resize. The originals run 1600 by 1200 pixels or larger, which for a weekend of tinkering felt almost unreasonable.
We were impressed, to say the least. Two days, no pipeline, no notes to speak of, just a fast renderer and two designers seeing how far a Saturday would take them.
No post production, no retouching. Everything here is straight out of the renderer. I only made it smaller.