Since there’s no action in this forum, I thought I’d post some cool links.
SIGGRAPH is the be-all end-all annual event in computer graphics. The latest technology is shown here, and a few years later, it starts to show up in commercial applications.
Here is a link of all the technical papers presented at SIGGRAPH 2008. http://kesen.huang.googlepages.com/sig2008.html
Some of it is too technical for me to understand, but the demo videos speak for themselves.
All kinds of stuff - painting, motion capture, rigging, realtime global illumination, soft body dynamics, etc… check it out!
Some of my favorites are:
Fast Viscoelastic Behavior with Thin Features - doing bad things to the Stanford bunny (a test model that replaced the buddah that replaced the Utah Teapot) http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~wojtan/
Articulated Mesh Animation from Multi-view Silhouettes - motion capture from silhouttes - no markers involved http://people.csail.mit.edu/jovan/
Self-Animating Images: Illusory Motion Using Repeated Asymmetric Patterns
This will make your eyes buggy! they appear to move, but they don’t. http://graphics.csie.ncku.edu.tw/SAI/