updated site?

[ad7venture]

You might want to look at Softimage Mod Tool.  It can only legally be used for free projects but they obviously have no way of checking on that.  I think it's more or less a free version of XSI.  It exports directx models which is a pretty accepted standard.

There's also Milkshape3d, but I find it quite hard to use myself.  Then again, I picked up Blender fairly well so it's different for me than most people.

Some people that don't take to Blender's interface use Wings, another free modeler, and then import into Blender to do animation.

There's also a free version of Bryce around, which is a pretty nice landscape modeling tool.  I'm thinking about looking at it, but haven't yet.

I was just working on a little Blender project and updated to their latest version.  I couldn't get the textures to work because they had, as usual, messed around with it for no apparent reason, making it no better than it was.  It does get frustrating some times.

[NigeC]

Art Of Illusion is a good free one with a very powerful render system
http://www.artofillusion.org/
I did some test renders with TS, AOI and kerkythea, Kerky wasn't that much better than AOI and I'm sure with a bit more fiddling I could of done a lot better, TS was the worst but a lot quicker
there's Gmax which is a very watered down version of 3D Studio Max a lot of level mod'ers use it, you need to sign up on TurboSquid

Yes Bryce 5.5 is free, I've done some nice work with it, its quite hard to model with tho

I'm a long term Truespace user, but the big draw back is its very hard to move on from it, no other software has anything in common with it, probably the nearest would be Maya but I don't have a small gold reserve to by that one lol

[ad7venture]

Another one that looks very easy to use is Google Sketchup.  The models could be imported into Blender for animation, or you could do a first person type game.  There's a huge 3d warehouse of free sketchup models.

[NigeC]

Yes Sketchup is really powerful without  it looking like it is lol
it'll export into most game engines and retain texture

[ad7venture]

It's a little weird exporting into Blender.  I haven't tried it yet, but you export the model in .kmz, which is their map format or something like that.  What it is really is a zipped collada file, so you rename kmz to zip and then extract it and it can be imported into other programs.  I used to think I should model everything myself, but that gets a little tough so I've been looking at the Google repository.  I also found a little plant maker program called plant studio.  I think there's a tree maker I haven't tried yet also.  I want to explore ways to increase development speed.