Cycles X got volumetrics support... And it's really fast...
seen from United Kingdom

seen from Switzerland
seen from China

seen from Singapore
seen from Malaysia

seen from Brazil
seen from China
seen from France
seen from Canada
seen from Poland
seen from Bangladesh

seen from Singapore
seen from Germany

seen from Singapore
seen from Canada

seen from Singapore
seen from China
seen from Russia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Canada
Cycles X got volumetrics support... And it's really fast...
Make your move... Blender 2.93, Cycles render...
Second part of the set. More volumetric rendering. I also introduce the Schlick material as a citizen of the uncountable amount of Physically Based Rendering methods, replacing the less realistic Phong material (I still keep it in a corner though).
Also, more CSG, more metaballs (though now, it’s more like meta-sphere/torus/tube), and metaballs in CSG (this is how I created the black glass). The smoke now works as planned (absorption works, emission works, scattering is not implemented).
Here is the first part of the second set (why is there a limit of 10 pictures ? ;_; ), showing some progress while I was piling up features and trying to figure out how to fix and tweak them. The time range for the entire set spans from March 22 to April 9. Lighting and aspect ratio had been fixed beforehand.
New things that appear here are proper transparency, volumetric rendering, normal mapping.