Kind of a work/play type thing. A couple of the people where I work are wanting to render huge images on the Beowulf cluster I'm setting up, so I've been experimenting with the programs to see how they work and to see how well the rendering program (Tachyon) scales across multiple machines when the renders are really complex. The VMD program is used for analysing/displaying biomolecular systems, and then Tachyon is used to render the system. I thought it was pretty neat, so I started playing around with it at home. I know VMD has a version for Windows, but I've only ever used it in Linux, so I'm not sure how well it works in Windows.. The downloads are free for both VMD and Tachyon if you want to try them out (you do have to register when you download VMD though).
If you decide to give it a try and run into any problems just let me know and I'll try to help you out. There are some good tutorials on the VMD site also.
VMD:
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/Tachyon:
http://jedi.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/raytracer/These are some Wikipidia entries for VMD and molecular modelling to help explain a little better what this stuff is for:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_molecular_dynamicshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_modelling