Recommended free renderer - An old question, maybe a new answer?

 From:  argo
3136.19 
Wow, you ask a question before going to bed and get lots of great answers - thank you!

@ Pilow, @Michael @et all - I have looked at Blender (like everybody!) before "finding" MOI. Its certainly a fantastically powerful program with a fast-UI for the experienced user. Huge learning-curve and I imagine requires practice to keep the key-strokes in organic memory. Still, as many of the free renderers use it to set materials etc, I have run through a few tutorials and could see it being useful if I followed a process-list for the odd rendering. My personal summary: so powerful, so non-intuitive! (please don't flame me).

- Kind of reminds me of WordPerfect Vs. Word 20 odd years ago.

@Paolo - No offence taken at all! Answer is "very little" $E ;-) .
This is purely a hobby for me with no financial gain (actually the opposite), and with 20 mouths to feed in a recession....

@neo - thanks I'll look at Thea, looks interesting. The developer/s working on Thea (with its potential for income), instead of working on KT would explain the tumble-weeds blowing thru the KT website. Perfectly understandable really.

@Ralf-S - another interesting program requiring investigation, thanks as well.

Looks like I need to spend some more "quality time" with the PC tonight!

Thank you all, any more?

Regards - Brendan (argo)