Well after lots of searching I found a very good tutorial for blender. Its a tutorial on how to do hair with the new particle system.
Its called Tutorial, Fur with new particles and its over at cgtalk.com
See http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=303334
Here is the results I managed to get after about 1 hr of tweaking.
One warning, when I turned on GI with yafray this render took ages. I expect I got something wrong though.
I also found this tutorial. It appears to be for an old version of Blender, but it explains how to get the radiosity to work in Blender.
The tutorial is available at http://blenderman.free.fr/tut/radiosity/uk/
I managed to get this
Also you may want to read about general radiosity at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiosity
Well I finally got round to using blender more.
I just finished my first new render using blender and yafray.
Its actually a model I created in CoCreate OneSpace Modeling as part of my daily job, which was imported via STL into blender using the Batch STL script.