On price: It's a little more weird but trueSpace (latest version is 7) is now free and has a pretty good renderer. IMHO it's less weird than Blender, which is also free. Actually, there might be older versions of trueSpace (v4 or v5 even) out there...I used to work for the company and we were putting the old versions on "covermount" discs and maybe even made a version free for download at one point. I started with 3D back in the day (early 90s) with trueSpace (well, POVray was first, but...) and like the older versions the best. v4 was where I stopped grocking it, really...
M