Redererer suggestions

Hi

I'm looking to complement my pipeline with a renderer. (Not a realtime-renderer). My pipe today looks like this:

Wings3D > Unwrap3D > CharacterFX > Blitz3D

What I would like is to find a nice renderer (preferably freeware) for production stills/reference images some where between wings and b3d. Wings offers some OK rendering options through YafRay but since I do all mapping in Unwrap3D I need something that fits later in the chain. The best option would of course be a good renderer that loads
*.b3d files. I prefer ro use *.obj as the intermediate format and I would like to keep doing that. But I guess I could use *.3ds instead. The point is that I want as few format conversions as possible

I know there is a plethora of renderers out there, so what I looking for is tips based on experience, pros and cons, not a mass of links to different renderers around the net.

Any suggestions?

//PetBom

I'm not sure where to get it from because the company stopped developing it a while ago, but one really good free renderer is BMRT (Blue Moon Rendering Tools.) While I'm not sure if this is still the case, at one point Wings integrated BMRT for rendering. I mean, it was a separate download, but once you downloaded BMRT you could just hit "Render" in Wings.

Note that you can bring texture mapped models from Ultimate Unwrap back into Wings for rendering. Wings can import obj file format. So even if BMRT is no longer available, you can use YafRay to render in Wings.

POV-Ray is another free renderer to look into. Ultimate Unwrap can export to POV-Ray files.

there's a BMRT newgroup here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bmrt/

Thanks for the tips. Since BMRT seems to be dead (or at least dying) i think I'll look into POV-Ray. I'm familiar with it. I used it about ten years ago with great results (3d studio ver 2 as I used at the time did not do raytracing). But since I'm getting old and comfortable I don't want to mess about with config-file/command line rendering, so does anybody know of any good front-ends? (I know there are some modellers based on POV-ray but since all I really want to do is basic rendering and some light setups I only need the bare essentials.)