Nvidia published a small interesting article on their blog about how their Quadro workstation graphics cards were used to create the final scene in the Natalie Portman film Black Swan. Oh my man, the feathers are rendered alright.
" The 11,000 feathers LOOK created for the transformation scene were based on high-resolution scans of actual tundra swans, and Lipowski built detailed feather geometry for quills, as well as complicated rigs to form the feathers individually.
