Sunflow Renderer

Sunflow Renderer is an awesome external rendering solution for Blender. Sunflow is a java based program, so you will need java to run it. The advantage to this is that it doesn't matter what platform you are on. It even runs on 64-bit machines, provided they have the 64-bit version of java installed.

They way Sunflow works is much different than the way other external renders for blender work. In other renderers like Yafaray or Indigo require you to set up your materials and lights seperatly from their blender settings. Sunflow, however, converts all of your blender materials, cameras, and lights into sunflow's format.

The next point of sunflow, which I really love, sort of goes against the title of the blog, but it makes sunflow even more customizable than the other renderers. After you have exported your scene from blender, you can then go into your .sc (sunflow filetype) file and edit all of your light, camera, and rendering settings. This means that you can quickly edit your settings without having to open up blender. The format of the file may seem a bit confusing to a non-programmer, but isn't truly that difficult to understand if you take a few minutes to read the different blocks of instructions.

Try out sunfow if you haven't. It's a renderer that I doubt you will easily forget.