Thats pretty impressive. Initially I thought it was just the hand that was cg. I’m particularly impressed with the mirror ball. I thought it was real and had been used to get the environment map for the scene.
The little one to the right is real. The big mirror ball is 3D. You can see it in the reflections the best: real objects have less reflection strength.
The new addition from Brecht is Exclude layers:
Cool message from Ton on the mailing list:
http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2012-April/036370.html
Ton about Phymec: I’d love to work with him; both for Blender python scripts and for Mango production help!
Seems Erwin is going to put him in contact with Ton.
I remember him posting in luxrender forums (he has some videos using SmallLuxGPU).
Seeing as phymec’s scripts are already quite well underway (useable for production it seems) i wonder what he can do with some time and funding 
It seems his current implementation uses the game engine, so i hope his first step (if he decides to work on it) will be to implement his scripts using the bullet integration branch.
btw; doesnt the Bullet integration branch by Aligorith seem to be quite stable? what/when is it planned to get it integrated into trunk? after the upcoming 2.63 release?
Bullet integration + the Phymec scripts would be pretty awesome. Anyone know if they use interactive demolishion as Rayfire does? So much simpler to set up than manually hiding main objects when they break apart a.s.o… 
My experience is no, not really stable at all… Neither is the new smokesim… 
But hopefully they will be stable. Soon. 
Sadly past movies and GSOCs have shown that production pressure and deadlines to complete a project don’t always equal implemented tech 
there are the charred remains of so many useful branches littering the ground of Blender Institute and other far away battlefileds… sniff.
is the interactive demolishion possible only because of bullet?
i kno that the guy spend years wworking on rayfire. but dear blender lord. it looks so awesome. youcan do almost everything to break parts. and now even interactive?
No, bullet physics is not integrated in Rayfire, it’s driven by Nvidia Physx, but bullet physics integration is in the works, there’s already a menychoice though greyed out, so I bet he’s already testing…
The Rayfire scripts today support interactivity, yes, but it looks like the Phymec scripts do to, but I’m not sure as I haven’t worked with them.
Hi,
I’ve got hold of him now, thanks!
-Ton-
Cant wait to see what comes out of this
woow this looks amazing
New smokesim? in Cycles?
New smokesim - or is it new features? I think it’s new engine behind it and new features compared to the old featureset, like collisions with animated objects a.s.o… To be honest I haven’t checked exactly what is changed, but some call it ‘new’ and some say ‘improved’ … And it’s available here: http://graphicall.org/914
Thank you, i will have a look
From 20 April. For me the most interesting is one that shows the nodes and you can see how they are using Lamps (and not Meshes) for the lights. I like more the negativa/olddemon method with emit meshes.
How will the mango team, solve the smoke issues in the movie(no sci-fi without smoke)? 
I asume they are using Cycles.