Scot Iverson has recently released AIR 8, and a new demo is now available.This has several inovative features that you will not find in othr renderers. The main new feature is shader-based procedural modeling – here are the details:

AIR 8 has two new shader types for creating objects during rendering: a procedure shader that populates a bounding volume with new objects on-demand, and an instancer shader type that creates new objects based on properties of a parent object. AIR 8 ships with a sample procedure shader for growing trees and a companion instancer shader for placing trees that demonstrate the flexibility, control, and efficiency possible with these new shader types.

A more detailed description is included in the AIR 8 press release:

http://www.sitexgraphics.com/html/air_8_0_press_release.html

Other AIR news since the last update on RenderMania:

• RhinoAIR, a Rhino-to-AIR plugin for Rhino 4
• An extensive set of user notes and additional tools for rendering Massive crowds with AIR
• Detailed information on using AIR with Houdini 9