Blender 2.71 will have the possibility to render smoke and fire in Cycles. This is a feature many users have waited for since Cycles was first shown to the public. Here are some demos:

As I was trying to come up with a title image for the updated displace modifier tutorial, I simply used it on Suzanne. The result reminded me very much of cubism style, more precisely of a painting I had to reproduce in school: Picasso's Three Musicians. I studied the original and realized:

Blender 2.70 will have one big new feature: Volumetrics! Not the entire toolbox like point densities or voxel rendering which would be required for smoke. But small things like volumetric absorption!

An in-depth review of the eBook edition of "Blender 2.6 Cycles Materials And Textures Cookbook" which is written by Enrico Valenza and published by Packt Publishing.

This is a short demo video of things to come for Blender. If everything works out all right, volume rendering will be included in Blender 2.70 (hey, we don't even have version 2.69 yet).

This is a brand new test of the current implementation of the SPH fluid particles in Blender 2.68a. It uses the double-density solver and 500.000 particles. Blendfile availabe for download and study.