ShinAsuka: Don't use a clay render to display your final art. To add more additional richness in your work, try using the 3 point lightning setup and add a little fog to it.

It's a great choice to use the anisotropic shader for metallic surface, but try also using the composite to add some noise. You might want to turn on the radiosity for more accurate lighting and reflection.

Nice model, are you self taught?

HDRI?
http://67.15.36.49/team/Tutorials/stephen_...finalrender.htm

Then show us something what you are made of before stucking up your nose.

Not only real time rendering, she means the graphic card could take care some of the rendering process instead of hogging all from your processor, which mean, faster.

There is a difference between real time rendering and normal rendering, the core foundation of real time comes from pixel shader technology often use as texturing and normal mapping. Certainly it would be wise not to use advance real time rendering when animating, if it is possible, we would already have movie-like games. But we are close, with next gen and 3.0 pixel shader.

Cars by the way took an average of 11 or 12 hours per frame to render.

Blizzard changed their pipeline from 3ds max, brazil, fusion to maya, renderman, nuke. This is for cinematic sequences, they still use 3dsmax for game level designs I believe, I don't think they will change the pipeline of their entire team.