Beginning as a single lonely chapter in GPU Gems 2, Michael Bunnel’s chapter on real-time occlusion without ray-tracing became a revolutionary new rendering technology (Read his chapter online). His point-cloud algorithms enabled a faster, more accurate rendering that was of great interest to Pixar, and Per Christensen integrated it into their Renderman tool. An article on CGSociety chronicles the effort.
During early stages, Christensen worked with Sony’s Rene Limberger who integrated point-based rendering on pre-production tests for Surf’s Up. Christensen further refined these techniques with ILM’s Christophe Hery who applied these methods to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. It quickly became apparent that these techniques had major implications for feature film rendering. Bunnell's single chapter had kicked off a minor revolution in CGI for feature film, point-based rendering.
@Sander van Rossen Ah, thanks for that. I’ve updated the post to include the link!
The entire book has been released online, the chapter written by Michael Bunnel can be found here:
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter14.html