Blender is an awesome freebie, Im waiting until 2.5 is finalized and released from the foundation before I dive into it and and really get to learning it. I even have the Tony Mullen books and still havnt produced anything with it , hahaha.  Then I wont be happy until I can render with Vray 1.5 from blender i guess ( a stable release and not the experimental script with a vray demo).