Hi Felix, like Mark mentions I'd recommend giving Simlab composer a try:

http://www.simlab-soft.com/3d-products/simlab-composer-main.aspx

It's rendering edition is $149 so it's way less in price than those full blown packages like 3DS Max, etc... and it's also a lot easier to use than those big packages.

The other one that you might want to check out is Carrara: (EDIT: somehow didn't see shaun mention that above already)
http://www.daz3d.com/i/products/carrara


> I agree it would be nice to do everthing inside Moi but I don't
> think Michael sees it that way and it would bring it to the same
> level as other programs that we started to use much less then
> Moi because of their complexity.

At some point I do want to include some basic level of rendering directly in MoI just for convenience but it has not been a high priority since there are such a large number of rendering programs out there.

- Michael