So, after several failed attempts over the years, I'm actually able to use Blender. I can't count the number of times I've tried to learn this program. I think it has to be one of the most user unfriendly unintuitive programs I've ever used. The developers seriously need do some time in UI prison for crimes against me. But I digress...

I've seen a number of people say "you just have to get over the initial learning curve". And this is true. I stand by my above statement, but after putting some real effort into learning it, I have to say it's awesome. That is, Blender is great, and the UI is still horrid, but now I know how to use it. I have to give them props for really decent documentation and tutorials on their website. Without those I would have given up on it (again). I really think it's a great program, it's too bad that I had to put 2 days of effort into just trying to basic things with it. Oh well, I only needed to learn it once and I think I'll stick to using from here on in.

Whenever I play around with rendering software I always do the mirror ball test:

The quality is pretty good, although it's certainly not the fastest renderer I've ever seen (took about 2 hours for that image on my 2 core E6750). I'm aware that I can switch out renderers, but I haven't learned how to accomplish that yet. I read something about the yafray renderer, but their site seems to be having difficulties so I wasn't able to try it out. So now I can join the 3 other people on the planet that's saying "Blender is OK".