I'm thinking of dabbling with a bit of 3D modelling, just for fun. Can any of you talented and good looking folks recommend some decent free 3D modelling downloads for creating characters, backgrounds and so forth. There seem to be a few options avaliable but as far as this goes I'm a complete n00b.

Daz3D. Terragen. Blender.

There ya go! That's all I know of. Daz3D's good but you have to get character models--that's how they get money. Blender's open source or something, I never really played with it, it's a pain to use. And Terragen does backgrounds and I'm not sure if they came out with the second version yet but when I downloaded it, it was a free download unless you wanted to use it commercially.

There's probably others.

I can't remember if Milkshape 3d is free or not.

You can download Maya: Learning Edition. And yeah, there's Blender, but from what I've heard it's crazy hard to learn.

Yep. Daz3D for figure posers, and Blender for complete construction.... both exellent and free.

Daz you will have to get figures and stuff... they have some free stuff available but not much if you're planning to go whole hog into 3d, i'd imagine. I have Daz but i only use it for figure reference...

DAZStudio is what I use for my comic. It's relatively easy to use and it's free.

Daz comes at the moment with the Victoria 4 model, and there's several other models available for free from their site (Vicky 3, Aiko 3, Michael 3, and Mike 4, at least). The deal with the Daz free figures, though, is that they're crackware, because you have to buy the morphs to do much with 'em. You can do poses, lighting, and so on, but to change the figure's shape and facial features you will need to blow $30-60 bucks on morph packs.

There are some full free figures out there but many are limited in their morphs. The best fully free figure that I know of is Apollo Maximus. Great figure, extremely morphable, and comes with hair, clothes, textures, etc.

Hair, clothes, textures, and props are all available for purchase, but again, there's a *huge* amount of free stuff. Look around before you blow any cash. I recommend starting with the Renderosity free section. It's friggin' huge.

Good luck!

oah nuts someone beat me to it, I was gonna suggest daz studio Guess I should look here more often. If you view my comic, esxpecially this page you will see what I'll be using called pwtoon. very nice shader. but if you used katfeete's link then ah well.

Hexagon, another daz3d product is a great product to make 3d models and is compatible with Daz Studio (D|S for short) but you'll pay a pretty price unless you see it on sale and are a platinum club member. Trust me, if you want to save money in the long run, and can afford to drop 100 bucks to sign up you'll save lots of money in the end. With all the 1.99 models, morphs, clothes and stuff you can get your library will quickly expand.

I like blender a lot. The interface is a bit funky, but it's extremely customisable and flexible. Wings 3D is a bit easier for modelling, but it requires external rendering (such as blender internal or Indigo or Yafray or any other ray tracer)

Thanks for those great replies chaps: that gives me plenty to get started. You're even more talented and better looking than I remembered!