> Actually sometimes for illustration work you don't even really want to have
> a super photorealistic render anyway.

Absolutely. Might be food for thought in targeting some MoI marketing and advertising dollars :-) ...

> I think that Photoshop has had some 3D support for a while now, do you happen to
> know if it is an area that is in active development, like have they added new things>
> for it in recent versions since the first release with 3D support?

I think CS3 was the first version with specific 3D support, although it was pretty lame from what I've heard (CS4 was my first upgrade after CS(1), so I don't have any personal experience with it). CS4 was a pretty major overhaul of what CS3 had, including better support for materials, full object level SRT transforms (including non-uniform scaling), and a custom rendering engine built-in (I think CS3 depended mainly on third party plug-ins for rendering). They've added some more 3D related stuff in CS5, which looks like additional refinements to what was in CS4 (shadow catcher support, image based lighting, more material types (glass, chrome)), something called Repousse for doing simple extrusions and stuff like that right in PS). So it still looks fairly lightweight in features, but again, seems more oriented toward designers needing to do some simple 3D stuff in the middle of a larger comp.

I'm sure they are not eying the pro 3D market, but more likely the web/brochure designer...