Free to low cost baking solutions?

so, I want to experiment with baking, make a few clothing items that are highly personalized for myself and I've only got poser4 (which I don't think will save out lighting changes for the textures) and PSP7 on this this machine, so I'm looking for a cheap/free solution while I tinker...

fake-n-bake would work I suppose, but limits my lighting options more than I'd like, but any suggestions link are welcome.

If you don't want to spend money, and you don't mind an interface with a fairly steep learning curve, Blender is your best option. It's completely free, and more than powerful enough for what you're looking to do.

Of course, if you had the budget, my best recommendation would be the Turtle renderer for Maya. Turtle is the only full featured renderer on the market designed specifically for baking, from the ground up. It really does an incredible job. It only works with Maya, though, so the two programs together would run you about $3500, which obviously does not fit your "free to low cost" requirement.

for the level and frequency of stuff that I'm doing, maya is right out the window (shame too because it was rather nice when I had access to it) just not cost effective for me ATM.
so it's off to play with blender =) thanks

PS
Chosen, did you catch my post in building tips re: beating the rotation glitches in build mode? I'm also told (but haven't tried) that the emerald viewer fixes most of that AND relocates the center of rotation to the root (instead of the bounding box center)