i am doing all my modelling in blender (free open source 3d do-it-all) although we have maya in the office. but i know blender and i am much faster with it. for rendering i work with luxrender (also free open source unbiased render) but as soon as i come close to landscapes i prefer vue. the nice thing about luxrender is it's directly exportable from blender and has nice material presets that i can use right away. the output takes some time but is really great. no tweaking just takes long. but then comes the plants outside ... i start to turn to vue :)

so for outside shots i use vue and for the interior i think i will have to do some more experimenting. if i need tight integration its great to do in vue. but for ultra realistic light behaviour i might mix luxrender for the interior plate and add the vue outside in post processing.

i have heard about Kerky but never used it. was it always available for windows? how do you rate it?