Seems you can replace kerkythea by another free crazzy product!
In blender you have the choice principally between 2 renderers : the internal renderer and Cycles!

Blender can use Luxrender.

yes and so many other! :)

YafaRay – Free renderer (GPL)
Pov-Ray – Free renderer (GPL)
Mitsuba – Free renderer (GPL)
Indigo Renderer
V-Ray
Octane Render

etc...
+ soon Pixar, Dreamworks... with the Open Libraries! Absolutly amazing!

Thank you everyone for the hints to look at for renderers. Another puzzle to work on! Ease of use and fairly quick renders at a good quality is my criteria at this point. I can't imagine waiting days to see a render! I know that makes me impatient, but with limited time to play with my new toys I seem to want instant gratification. What was I telling someone the other day? Oh yeah (patience is a virtue". :) thanks again for sharing your ideas with me!

John

Hi.
There is also Ironcad compose. It is easy to set up, drag and drop materials with a library, hdr illumination, realy fast renders, and a real time render quite convincing. Export from Moi as obj. And this is not only a renderer...
And it's free. http://www.ironcad.com/index.php/products/ironcad-compose
Cheers
Moujiik

<< And it's free.

Seems only 30 days ? ;)

>>> source http://www.ironcad.com/index.php/support/download-products

>>> Beyond the 30-day trial, you can continue to use IRONCAD COMPOSE as a free licensed product utilizing data created during the trial or reuse data from other sources to build, render and communicate your ideas.

I don't know if anyone else works in a parallel Rhino - MoI workflow*, but if you do you should definitely take a look at Neon for Rhino. For a free plugin (with a ~$500 optional hardware component) it really does a fantastic job.

As someone who came partially out of the more traditional shader-based rendering world (Mental Ray & Turtle in Maya) I was surprised to find Neon/Rhino to be such an enjoyable and competent tool. Being able to get immediate feedback on a scene has made a huge difference in the speed at which I can work. (not my work, but a video example here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWD6HyyWRpw)

What's nice is that if you also have a Brazil licence you can get slightly more efficient final renders out of Brazil after using Neon to nail your look.

-FDP

*(I love MoI for starting models and getting ideas out there and then usually move into Rhino whenever I finish/want to bring Grasshopper, Python or other features into the mix)