That speed modeling video is pretty cool and interesting!

Had an idea for a technique on the river in Canada yesterday to display mountains full of trees like I see them here every day. The idea is to only transfer basic data to the graphics card (a 32x32 RGB texture in the following example and a simple mountain mesh) and use that to create and render a bunch of (what I call) virtual sprites. Runs on almost 300fps on my laptop, depending on how much area of the screen is covered with trees. Maybe that technique could be extended to render fur but that will get more complicated and slower, and right now it's still full of bugs too.