Rendering on a Budget?

The third party rendering is pretty cheap comparatively to other markets, I guess. But yeah, when you compound that with hardware investments that you'll need to make if you want to go down the GPU route, then yeah, it's significant. It really is. If you're on a budget and you're just looking to dabble and learn and play around and you are on a Mac, absolutely download the demo of Arnold and play with it because why not? But only do so. Don't grab it until you've gotten a pretty firm grip on physical because if you don't know anything about rendering, then all you're doing going to be, all you're going to do is confuse yourself