The above link is for Virtualight…
It is a very impressive 3d rendering engine 
It used to cost $$$, but now is offered for Free, even for comercial use!
EDIT: Thanks Dan, I saw the Open GL preview mode, and I assumed it was real time…
Thanks for pointing this out…
it is still cool for people who use need a freeware rendering engine nice effects :)…
I may be wrong (especially since I did not read everything) but I do not believe this is for real time 3D. I think this is a rendering engine for things like raytracing, etc. In other words, for still scenes and pre-rendered animations.
Blender 3D is another free 3d package. This one is open source and contains an OGL real-time engine to boot.
For more free bees try this thread
Virtualight is a rendering engine that handles things like photon mapping and caustics. I recently bought a plugin for Truespace for $10US now Virtualight has gone freeware. Without a plugin though, Vitualight requires the scripting of scenes and shaders. Lots of work.
yeah, most of the free highend render engines are a nightmare of shader scripting and scene description…
Not for me
Yea, I got the plugin for truespace also!
It is a nightmare, like POV if you dont have plugin…
I got deal on plugins… I got AniPAK RayPAK conversion PAK,Game PAK, Level Exporterpak and DEPAK all for 400$
I think Caligari waw hurting for money, I made them an offer and they immediately took it a few months ago.
buying One at a time the packages are a rippoff, but all together it is realy a pretty good deal…
In hindsite, I wish I would have saved the 400$ and the initial 600$, and went and bought Lightwave… I am sure I would be alot happier than I am now…
The sales woman was willing to make a deal with me on tutorial videos also, if I bought in bulk… she said she would give me half price if I bought 6 or more of the tutorial videos… I never did it tho… tehy removed all teh pictures from the PDF HElp file… and I am not going to pay them to get the manual on video, I see it as a realy sneaky dishonest tactic to gain money from noobies trying to figure out the manual… the manuals clearly had diagrams and pictures at one time, it is constantly refering to them… I think it is a scam to burn the noobie out of a few more dollars…
anyways… Virtual light is pretty cool so far… I may do something with it in the future… .
I know I would have been a lot happier if I just bought LightWave first.
I’ve used both and I’ve gotta tell you… there’s no comparison.
(Like you said… the initial price is attractive, but by the time you get all of the plug-ins you need it’s a lot closer to the same price).
Lightwave is a good program, but being a member of Caligari’s Proteam has its advantages. I don’t own any of the plugin packs, but the training videos were quite helpful. I’m not sure I would have learnt as fast if I’d gone with a program like Lightwave, so I’m happy about the path I’ve taken.
I am somewhat happy with trueSpace, with the conversion pack lets me export to Viewpoint, and VRML… I am definatly going to keep it installed once I have Lightwave 8…
I was trained in Lightwave 7.5, So comeing from there to truespace was quite a shock… they do things quite diffrently…
There are some aspects of truespace I realy like…Like the ability to run under LINUX useing WINE, without any effort. it uses Open GL and Direct X so it runs sweet both in Linux and in WinDoze…
It likes my Black box window skinning plugin 
and it renders pretty quick… I like some of the shaders and things in raypack also…
even with lightwave, I will still use Wings for most of my modeling 
I guess the more applications the marrier!
(BTW, I see snapshots of Lightwave 6.5 -8 in WINE screenshots !! WOOT!!!)
one of trueSpace’s best features is something that lightwave has, and in ts that’s caled the Clip animation. This allows for overlapping levels of animation. While not unique, it is easier than any other implementation I’ve ever seen. Same goes with thier object grouping system, very easy to work with.
i used TS from ts3 on till now 6.6 because of its easy modelling features…
but never get along with that virtualight…
if you need a good and cheap renderer use
carrara 3 all from caustics to hdri and so easy to handle!!!
I didn’t enjoy Carrara… every time I tried to get something done in the demo I found myself restricted in some way or another.
I was a member of ProTeam also. I joined ProTeam mainly for the training. It helped.
I’m not trying to slam trueSpace. I’m just saying that by the time you add up the plug-ins, video training, and so on… you could have bought LightWave (or come very close).
The more apps the better. I agree with that 100%. Everyone approaches things in different ways and everyone has their favorite tools.