Okay so summer is coming up and I may not have daily access to Maya since I do not plan to take any college courses so I chose Blender for my home use since it is free and I can only work part-time with school and portfolio development, etc. I got it installed tonight and I like it a lot, especially since it imported my Doric Column ngon .obj file without any problems. I tried a quick render in its ray-tracer then downloaded Indigo to try.

All I did was import my column, scale the default cube for use as my ground, switched the default Spotlight to a Sun light, saved out the indigo .xml file then closed Blender without even setting up materials and started the render. When I came back from dinner I got this...



Pretty simple. I see a lot of potential with this renderer. Next I will try Kerkythea, which can do both biased and unbiased renders. In the meantime I'm getting tired of waiting for renders and Quicktime encoding to complete on my main machine so I am setting up Ubuntu Linux on a spare 2.4Ghz machine with Blender, Indigo and Kerkythea for rendering as well as Cinelerra for video editing and Gimp for image editing. I want to see how far I can take this free software thing :)