[citation][nom]brikbot[/nom]Very true, though considering that some very large people (Nasa, Northrop Grumman) are moving to Blender from software such as Maya and 3Ds for simulation with the game engine and then also for rendering, it seems to me that Blender would be a very good candidate for testing. Not to mention this one peice of software can provide multiple tests, since it has a full game engine (uses the Bullet physics engine), and can push any CPU to its knees with rendering. Probably not worth much because they they are only single threaded right now (and other software have some better solutions in some cases) is the baking of it physical sims, such as the particle, smoke, and fluid sims.[/citation]
Also very true 😀 Blender is a great program, no doubt, and I love it. Problem is, it probably costs more in training, time, etc, to convert a large office to blender than the cost of 3DS Max/Maya/etc... also there is no Vray support for Blender (yet!). I've been trying to ease my own office into the Linux/Blender/Luxrender path, but no go yet.
Luxrender is a great alternative, but it's not quite as mature or feature rich yet. I've got my eye on it though... 😉