Windows Live Writer
I finally decided to take a pop at using Windows Live Writer to write for my blog. While Community Server has a reasonable editor, it is an online in-browser editing experience and can suffer from the usual shortcomings that architecture has. Creating thumbnails and uploading images was definitely a chore, and Live Writer takes care of all that junk for me.
Below is a random photo from my files
It's an old trueSpace screenshot. Back before I changed over to 3ds Max and Rhino, I used to use trueSpace. It was pretty good, but at the time, quite buggy. Its renderer has gotten quite a bit better over the years, but in the early days, it really lacked realism. When they added in the new lighting models (I was testing radiosity when I took the screenshot above) and some of the newer materials, that helped. Unfortunately, I had moved on after this version, and haven't kept up with it since.
One of my favorite renderers of all time has been Lightwave (the modeling and animation in that tool are excellent too, but it's the end result that impresses me there). That always had the perfect warmth for creating the types of scenes I was interested in. The highlighting and glows that would come out of that were just awesome.
I haven't done any 3d rendering in quite a while. Before we had our son, I was using Rhino primarily for CNC machining and 3ds Max 6 for the occasional odd render.