Ok this is way fun and drags me back to the days I was diligently trying to build a 3D rendering engine from first principles (sort of, I had Glide to put stuff on the screen).

The renderer is perceptually better than the one that is included in my CAD package (TurboCAD) for pretty much all materials. So I'm guessing they will snarf it and dump the proprietary renderer and replace it with this stuff if they can.

But the really interesting idea that popped into my head was this; could Google offer 'rendering as a service'?

Specifically they have a zillion machines, many of which are doing nothing important, and they have this rendering package, and they have a scheduler that can put things on any machine. Imagine a service where you sent them a suitably detailed model description, and a set of lights, could they send you back a rendered image? Could you parameterize changes to the model description over time so that they could send you images in time based on your models? Could they do say 480 renders 'free' per month and then maybe $0.19/render over 480 in a single month?

Could you create a studio of modellers who would design models, and animators that would animate those models over time, and a director who would compose those animations into scenes? This is basically Pixar without the expensive renderfarm. Does that enable new studios to bring their own vision to life? Does it offer a cost effective service to places like Pixar which allows Google to make money on otherwise idle resources? Curious minds want to know :-)