if you want a good website to teach you maya try digital-tutors.com the can teach you the basics and you could buy their training kits if you really want to learn stuff. their tutorials are all quicktime video format.

what about pov-ray? it's free, has a great user community & evidently produces great images - although i believe the learning curve is a bit steep.

(note: my 3D imaging experience is relegated to running through a few "Simply-3D" tutorials, so saying that i'm NOT an expert is quite a bit of an understatement. just posting an observation of my own.)

Discreet (Autodesk) have a free modelling tool called GMax you can download from their website (and is also distributed by many games these days).
Aimed squarely at computer game users and manufacturers to create objects for a 3D gaming environment it's highly powerful and relatively easy to use.

Not sure if you can easily export the models to other formats, if not you could just export them to your favourite game (check the game for instructions, it usually comes with the tools) and use that as a rendering engine.

As to povray, it's a nice tool. Didn't know it still was being updated, not used it in years.

it's been a while since i have looked at pov-ray but i believe it is a powerful rendering engine with only a very simple modeling interface.


it is entirely scripting based too (or at least last time i checked...several years ago )

needless to say though if you can become very well with it you can create some very powerful renderings.

look into a piece of software called rhino3d last i remember it was pretty damn cheap and extremely powerful.

it works using NURBS (heheh thats one of the first websites i ever built right there). and has a rendering engine that can produce some sexy images.

its expensive to buy, but if you can prove you or someone you know is a student or teacher and then have the student/teacher buy its only 195...which is a steal for what it is. btw it also has a free trial.