Simple question really, what free graphics rendering software do people here have experience with and would you recommend it?

I have some experience with Povray and Pymol. The former is rather mainstream, the latter a specialized program that people outside the bio/medical field probably have little use for. Povray can be quite useful, especially if you create your sceneries with a computer program explicitly written for your purpose, but it rather does not fall into the "quickly get a result" category. I cannot really recommend it, as I don't know your background (in computer graphics), your purpose, or the Povray alternatives. It's somewhat fun to play around with it for a while, though.

I have some experience with Povray and Pymol. The former is rather mainstream, the latter a specialized program that people outside the bio/medical field probably have little use for. Povray can be quite useful, especially if you create your sceneries with a computer program explicitly written for your purpose, but it rather does not fall into the "quickly get a result" category. I cannot really recommend it, as I don't know your background (in computer graphics), your purpose, or the Povray alternatives. It's somewhat fun to play around with it for a while, though.

 

Povray looks good.

 

I was thinking about using something to render some 2d fractal images. I have the "raw data" as 2d coordinates and was looking for something flashy to plot this.