That's really cool, mate. Looking forward to those demos. I had a feeling you weren't using the latest version. I have seen some of your earlier works with it. Very nice work :- ) Are you planning to use this for movies or games? or just experimentations/workflows?
I'm using it sometimes together with 3ds max and compositing. It would be quite difficult to get the typical interior look lighting, but it could be great for background vegetation heavy animations.
Hope I'll have the time to render some proof of concepts. Maybe using Corona to render "hero" objects and hero closeup plants and everything else a real-time engine. Probably with some real filmed objects composited in to sell the shot.
And about how they can get such high quality lighting in near real-time... I think software like these are programmed very differently.
I mean in programs like these you can model and build stuff while having insects flying around, trees animated by wind and so on. Turned on all the time.
Imagine that in 3ds max viewport - having things in playback all the time while you would try to model something.. Sometimes even just a single animated tree playback would slow things down, let alone having multiple trees animated together, flying insects, particles, lighting and post processing effects.
In this tornado gif, which was just a test, so I didn't placed some strong fans to have a stronger influence on the trees, but the explosion there happened spontaneously. I didn't placed that there.
I think it looked cool, but when I watched later some real footage with tornadoes and storms I noticed things like that really do tend to happen.
I think it's great to have the power to fill a scene with "working" objects and creatures and systems so you'll have sometimes secondary things happen in scenes without you specifically rigging that up.
This happened often in my tests.