POVRay

POVRay is a wonderful raytracing program. It is free and produces results that are superior to a lot of programs that cost thousands of dollars. Of course it is also a lot harder to use because you work with the guts of the design process instead of a pretty graphical user interface. Therefore the learning curve can be quite steep. I have been using this fantastic program since the early 80s when it was called DKBTrace and only available on the Amiga computer. It is now the most cross-platform renderer in the world, being available for almost every type of computer.

I have always loved the fact that you can get it to do wild things, but I have never created anything as amazing as this pic. (Go here for a larger view.) Just look at the water's edge! Remember that this is a 3d place. Each blade of grass, each butterfly is an object, and the shadows and reflections are really shadows and reflections -- they are not faked. You could view this from various positions... if you had the source file instead of just a rendered pic.