The rendering time of a given scene is mostly dependent on the complexity of the scene, the size of the output and the hardware performing the actual rendering. On my current hardware, the Suburbs 2100 image took about 15 minutes to render in the 1024x768 resolution using the default rendering engine.

I don't surf the web much, but the sites I visit from time to time is 3D Artists (<http://www.raph.com/3dartists/>).

Of course it will. It is only a matter of time before this will happen. The digital medium is new and so are most of the users of the medium. Once the digital art world will mature and gain acceptance and respect among the general public, I'm sure that the best digital artwork will be shown even in the most respected museums around the world.

After all the digital medium is just that - a medium. A new set of tools for the artist to use, and the artist is the one who creates the art, not the medium.

Another big one which I'm currently working on is a 3D action game : Unreal 2.

Especially from the Realism period of 19'th century. To name the names I remember:

Ilya Repin, Jan Matejko, Canaletto (ok, that's 16'th century), Iwan Schischkin, Konstantin Makowski. Rembrandt also.

>From currently living artists I admire the works of Howard Terpning and many SF/Fantasy artists like:

The only publicity I ever got in the beginning was only through the internet. In fact 99% of my assignments and job offers come through the internet. I think the same is true for many other digital artists.