I’ve been looking for a more standard looking program than blender, just so I know both ways of modeling, because I have looked at some of the demos of the pay for modelers and noticed they looked quite diffrent from blender. Maya, and 3ds Max are the two that I looked at. Any help is apreciated thanks.
For poly, there’s Wings 3D. I didnt get on too well with it personally. There’s also alot of others floating around sourceforge.com. Just have a gander.
For NURBS modeling, there’s not really any nice free programs. The ones ive tried are very limited in certain aspects and very primative. I get around this by using a Rhino Trial.
The rhino trial is only limited by the number of saves. So, if you use it to model and dont save the file, you can continue to use it. (you can save, just no more than about 20 times). You can also get trial editions of 3Ds max / Maya etc… which last forever, (or used to)
Can’t use them for commericial work and you are limited (such as render size /settings), but for trial and learning, ready for when you do buy it, its pretty perfect.
There’s also the freeware version of truspace and the likes floating around somewhere on the 'net.
Anim8or…good for beginners…I guess…
art of illusion
Let’s see…
- Metasequoia: there’s a freeware version of it (MetasequoiaLE).
- Hamapatch: Patch-based modeling.
- trueSpace 3.2: Not sure if there’s a newer version of it available for free (they claimed to be offering v5, but it was an April Fools joke :p). The feature list looks nice, though.
- Moray: Modeler for POV-Ray. Recently announced that it’d be released as GPL (open source).
- Anim8or: Like Turin Turambar said, good for beginners.
- OpenFX: It’s been around for a long while, but last I tried it (v 1.0) it had some stability problems.
Note that the above are Windows-only (apparently) and I’m not sure whether they’ll work with Wine or anything similar.
Cross-platform:
- Wings 3d, as mentioned by lukus. It’s a good modeler, has some things that Blender hasn’t (a lot? I don’t know, been a while since I last gave it a try).
- Art of Illusion: Written entirely in Java, aims to provide a complete free 3D package.
-
EQUINOX-3D (Linux/OS X/IRIX): Not sure about the licensing thing. Seems to be free, but the author wants some money
- K-3D: Like AoI, aims to be full-featured.
I was also going to suggest Amapi, of which versions 4.15, 5.15 and 6.1 have been made freeware (at least for a while?). It’s great at NURBS modeling, but I can’t seem to find a good download link (ever since Polyloop decided to not offer the latter two versions anymore).
But, anyway, there’s a good list.
im impressed that no-one here has mentioned g-sculpt yet. 
its free as in free speech and beer! eg. its open source.
i think its more along the lines of the app being free but the developer accepting donations.
That’s pretty much what I said (or meant to say). It’s the shareware thing on the license page that had me a bit confused. Seems more like donationware.
Opensource and capable of doing many things that most polygon modellers can’t:
Now with Python scripting and general awesomeness!
(also platform independant)
In my mind, there are three “free” poly modellers worth knowing about - they are all crossplatform, opensource and have very different strengths and features:
Blender
Wings
TopMod
Koba
Anim8or.I used anim8or for 1,2,3 months and loved it.(I’m still on the anim8or forums)
Then I was doing something and saw something about blender.Whoa, I found the website and found more and more awesome looking images.Frankly to say I knew about blender in month 2 but it wouldn’t work on the old computer.But finally Mac came and I started doing Blender.Less and Less I used PC and Anim8or.1 month later,I walk to PC and try Anim8or.Blender is in my head.I’ve memorized thousands in blender.So there I fell into the huge in quality blender.And I’ve gotta say I LOOOOVVVEEE it!Here’s how it is:
Simplicity:Anim8or
More controls, more everything,better quality: Blender.
Start with Anim8or than jump to Blender.
Just trying to be helpful.
Surprised no one has mentioned: Tere’s a free version of 3dS max that will let you model stuff, but it doesn’t let you render. Just you can models is with it but you can’t make images. It was made so you can make stuff for games and mods and stuff, but you can make whatever with it and then importj it to Blender and make just can’t render wioth it.
That’s what I started with. I like Anim8tor. But, hmmm,…I really need to start doing stuff…