Intel recently showed a demo of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars with a highly modified engine using ray tracing.  TG Daily has the report with a few pictures.  Interestingly enough, Intel was running the demo on a 64-bit Linux distribution, which means, of course, it was also using OpenGL.  Yes, Intel supports ray tracing on 32- and 64-bit versions of both Windows and Linux.  Nice.

It will be a while (if ever) before ray tracing is standard fare on the desktop, but progress is being made rapidly toward that possibility.  Reflections, refractions, collision detection, and lighting will all be much more realistic with ray tracing.  It's cool stuff and it will be interesting to see how it progresses over the next few years.

Blender is a free, open source 3D modeling and animation program.  It is available in officially supported versions for Windows, Linux, Mac OS, FreeBSD, and Solaris, and will work in several other operating systems.  Blender is extremely powerful, as you can see from the extensive feature list.  Be sure to check out the gallery to see what skilled Blender users can make.

The Blender community has been growing rapidly, especially in the past few years.  More features are being added, bugs are being fixed, documentation is becoming more in depth, and big projects are being worked on to demonstrate Blender's prowess.

This short film was made using Blender by a small team over a period of several months.  Be sure to watch it in high resolution if possible.  You can download copies of the movie here.

All the files from Big Buck Bunny are available to download for free (at the bottom of the page, under Production Repository), because it is an open movie.  There is also an open game in the works using content from Big Buck Bunny.

I'll post a lot more about Blender at some point in the future.  The learning curve is very steep, but I plan on conquering it slowly and surely.  I'll be documenting my experiences with Blender here, so stay tuned.