Hi guys,

I've read this thread with interest, and I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Cycles yet. It's Blender's integrated path tracing renderer with lots of flexibility and great quality, and it's free. Ok, to learn Blender and Cycles requires some degree of obsessive video tutorial viewing, but it's not that hard to learn.

Adding to this: MoI wizard Max has created an experimental MoI plug-in for the standalone version of Cycles, enabling you to render from within MoI itself. Pretty cool:

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=7208.12