Radiosity lightning

Does anyone know is there available freeware/low-cost radiosity lightning
plug-ins for 3d Studio Max(3) ?

Renderings just look so plastic/arficifial without a good rendering/lightning tool...

About radiosity rendering.. I think it depents a lot of what you're doing. If you've to render a single object it won't be a big deal (well.. this depents too) but the difference between default-rendering (with raytrace or not) and radiosity-rendering is quite noticeable if you're planning to render whole background-environment for the scene. For example these pics: (1st one normal rendering, 2nd radiosity)

a) a link to show ya the "real" deal :
http://www.3dluvr.com/marcosss/

be sure to watch ALL PICS. and if you got the bandwidth ALL ANIMS. there´s some of the coolest dome-light-style scenes there are.

b) VERY IMPORTANT.

if your renders look very artificial, it´s your fault, not max´s :P .
No seriously. you can achieve VERY GOOD quality with max standard render (even better since you are using max 3 wich is a lot better then max2.5).

I agree with you about that setting up lightning thing. You can get very good results without radiosity if the scene lights are placed right and the textures
are adjusted correctly. I don't know much
about new rendering/lightning methods of 3dsMax3 (I do know methods of v2.5 though) and so there is of course always room for improvement what comes to lightning.

I checked again those examplepics I put here before. Those pics do not tell the whole thruth about differences between "regular" and "radiosity". (I noticed that it's not even the same scene! ) So.. There's a better example in NewTek's site (http://www.newtek.com), under Lightwave6.0 section: Check that Wolksvagen out.

Those "real" deals were modelled gr8! But what I meant by saying that it's not so important to use radiosity in a single object was this: Radiosity's mainidea (tell me if I'm wrong!) is to reflect light from all objects (so that the object's selfcolor is reflected to the rest environment) and if there's only one object, radiosity is not required (or not even recommended in some cases). And most of the pics in URL http://www.3dluvr.com/marcosss/ didn't have nothing but a gray or white background and one or two objects in scene so the dome-lightning was the right choise in this case. (Even if most of the models did look too much computer-generated, IMHO of course )

But as you said: Creativity and knowledge comes first. After you're satisfied with your work you can try to make it more realistic by adding extra things like radiosity. I've just heard and saw so
much good results made with radiosity, so I wanted to try it too. I'll tell or show the results in near future.

check here to see a fast and not really good example to show what i mean :
http://bts.ovh.org/folio/imageFolio.cgi?action=view&link=NiatPac&image=HEAD2.jpg&img=&tt=img

dropping in on your conversation for a minute...

Here's a couple questions:

1) Does using radiosity give an visible improvement to renders?
2) I'm not familiar with "dome lightning". Is it possible to do this in Blender, offhand?
3) Any other lighting hints besides the ones mentioned?

Thanks from a novice,

dome lighting is not really useful without radiosity. you could do it by hand tho. built the dome (hemisphere). then put an omni-light to each vertex. it gives better day-light-style renders. but is a hell of a work. for 3d-Max, there´s a script creating that kinda stuff easily and fast. it´s free on boboland.