Recommend a freeware renderer?

Hi can anyone recommend a windows-based freeware renderer that will let me create simple objects with textures (or text), apply a light source and render and export as bmp or perhaps as an animation strip? Preferably it will use 24bit colour too.

Why? I want to make some 3D loking sprites for a 2D game.

Thanks in advance.

http://www.caligari.com/Products/trueSpace/tS3/resources/default.html

Its free

Cheers

Garion

I recommend TS3 as well.
Just... don't give them your best email address.

www.blender.org

Maybe PovRay? (http://www.povray.org/)

wow, thanks for the replies guys! Any more?

www.yafray.org

( useable from within blender or wings3d as well )

woo got the lot thanks. Now to learn some new stuff.

My personal favorite is POV-Ray, which is freeware.

the main difference between it and most other renderers is that you can't actually 'draw' a 3D scene with it, but have to describe it programmatically, like a programming language.

At first it sounded much more complicated, but after playing around with it a little I found it to be much easier to get a half-way decent scene that way that trying to do the manual 3D drawing.

(The ringed planet logo in my signature below was done with POVRay, as was the large animated logo on my website, http://www.xlsior.org )1

OK, cool, thanks xlsior

From a recent look to answer a similar problem...

Free:

www.wings3d.com
www.anim8or.com
www.artofillusion.org
www.openfx.org (newly updated)

Low cost commercial:

I just bought Rheingold3d ( http://www.tb-software.com/products2.html ) for $50.