The Blender

An extraordinary freeware 3D CAD/animator/game-generator/gui-builder. Python scripted too. Try http://www.blender.org. Don't let the rather odd UI daunt you - it soon feels natural and this is really a fantastic tool!

The gui still doesn't feel smooth to me, and I've spend many hours in it. I can now do modelling competently, but I always make the wrong gestures and I never can remember how to make smooth work for doing mesh smoothing Personally, I think that NaN was trying to be too clever for their own good when they made the UI. On the other hand, SoftImage felt smooth after only one hour behind it. I guess you get what you pay for sometimes.

That might be true for someone with a lot of 3D work under their belt, or who gets to use the commercial 3D tools for a living. For those of us who don't have those opportunities, blender is ridiculously easy to learn and wonderfully productive. Check out the nurb-girl mpegs at http://www.blendermania.com/showcase/allshow/BarryBonds/BarryBondsGalley002.php3 [BrokenLink] to see what's possible!

On the third hand, Maya has a free "Personal Learning Edition" if you just want to play with 3D, and it's a fairly reasonable price (< $2000) if you find you need it. And if you do take to it, you have instantly marketable skills. Much like Linux, Blender is only free if your time is worthless.

See BlenderWiki

As of version 2.30 (now 2.36 as of this writing), Blender's UI is much more usable. It still supports a number of odd interface conventions, but also makes everything available via menus (and typically hotkeys as well). Gestures are all but gone, and user prefs support other behavior defaults. Sitting through a couple of the video tutorials gets one accustomed to any oddities that remain. Its internal renderer is much zippier. It still has some warts -- undo support is there, but spotty in places, and undo is very memory-hungry. Transformations like translate, scale, and rotate all can constrain to global and local x/y/z axes, but the same is not true for the viewport camera, which still lacks an "orbit" view or a turntable view that behaves as expected (viewport camera control is still my #1 gripe). Still, the 2.3x series definitely deserves a second look for anyone turned off by previous versions.