Well said.
Blender is a modeling, animation and rendering suite. You can model, texture, animate and render all from within Blender. Is also supports related video and sound editing. You would be hard pressed to find a better non-commercial tool with all of these features. Blender is also open source. This means that when someone finds a better way to approach problem solving with the app, they can modify the program as they see fit, providing they have programing ability.
Wings 3D is a mesh modeling application. Its strengths lie in its full featured modeling tool set. Its designed to allow quick and powerful creation and manipulation of meshes. You also have access to a powerful UV mapping tool called Auto-UV. Wings does not have native rendering or animation capabilities, but there are scripts for exporting to external renderers such as POV-Ray and Yafray.
Those are quick off the cuff descriptions of those programs. Revisit each offical site and user community to for more detailed information. There are so many options out there, but between the two applications you have enough to get you started in 3D.
You are going to need to learn 3D modeling, texturing, lighting, theory upfront to save time and frustration down the road.
Tutorials will lead you through a set of steps to get you from point A to point B. However, theory will allow you to understand the way things work together. Theory and technique can be applied to any app you use, but application specific knowledge is useless when going between applications. Once you learn theory on how to use bevel, lathe, extrude, loft, subdivide, and smooth to model what you want, it then becomes a matter of finding these tools in the application of your choice. But what good are the tools without knowing how they work? The same goes for all aspects of 3D.
General Resources
Read Digital Sculpture Techniques by Bay Raitt and Greg Minter. This explains how to model for subdivision surfaces. Be sure to download and save the PDF.
Take a look at An Artist’s Real-Time 3D Glossary - Basic definitions crucial to understanding the world of 3D.
3-D Animation Workshop has some outdated application specific info, but the majority is relevant theory.
Check out Lighting Tutorial Part 1 by Amaan Akram.
Baisc 3 Point Lighting
Lastly, READ (don’t skim) the manuals for both Blender and Wings 3D.
Blender User Documentation
Be sure to try finishing the tutorials in the book. You won’t regret it.
Wings 3D manual
In addition to user info, there is a ton of god theory in this manual also.
Once you have some theory under your belt, and you’ve done the tutorials in the Blender manual, try 3D Total’s list of Tutorials. Most of those are application specific, but once you understand how Blender and/or Wings work, you should be able to reference their manuals to get similiar results from the tutorials.
I’ve probablly written way too much, but you can always book mark and save the info for later.
