I've been wanting to jump into Blender's Cycles engine so I went ahead made this simple Stargate scene. Cycles is pretty amazing, to say the least. Way more robust than the old internal renderer. Reflectivity, bump mapping, and lighting is a lot more natural and realistic. Depth of Field has been rebuilt where you no longer need to use a compositing node and you don't get those bad looking artifacts when an object cant decide whether it should be in focus or out of focus. The best feature though is the real time renderer. You can edit, move, and model elements within your scene and have Blender constantly updating a low sample render view so you can see what your changes actually look like. No more, sitting around for a twelve hour render only to realize your texture isn't mapping right, or the lighting isn't strong enough.
