Tools which I use:
Bryce 5 Bryce is a great introductory commercial 3D rendering package. This is a good program to buy if you want to try 3D modeling and rendering, but you don't want to spend a lot of money. Bryce 4 was the first 3D program that I bought, and I used it to make my first serious 3D images. Version 5 improvs on the liting.
Vue d'Esprit 4 This commercial program is an outstanding 3D rendering package. With it, you can create realistic landscape scenes containing elements such as clouds, terrains, trees, planets, special lighting effects, etc. You can also import and render models created with various modeling programs. I highly recommend this program.
The Gimp The Gimp is a very advanced and extremely capable photo editing and image manipulation program. It is similar to Adobe Photoshop. The Gimp is a free program, available for both Linux and Windows. I highly recommend The Gimp. I use The Gimp to retouch my 3D rendered images, to combine together images from other programs, or to do various other kinds of post processing work. I also use The Gimp to create some textures for some of my 3D models.
Blender Blender is a powerful modeling program. It has scanline rendering and sum ray tracing rendering ability. I use this program to make many of my models. It takes a while to get accustomed to its interface though. This program uses the python programming language for scripting many of its functions. There are many python scripts that can be found on the internet that you can run with this program to export the models to several different file formats. Blender is an open source project and is continuously improving.
Yafray Yafray is a very powerful renderer that can render very realistic scenes. It works excellently with Blender.
POV Ray
POV is a popular freeware ray tracing program. Scenes are created
in POV with statements in its own scripting language. I use this
program to make some of my projects. Go to the POV Ray home page
to download this program. The POV site also has many links to
other programs and utilities for 3D modeling, rendering and ray
tracing.
GSculpt This is an open sourc procedural modeler. When you bild a model with this program, this program creates a list of each step you used to bild that model. After you bild your model, you can replay those steps to see how you bilt your model. You can modify your model by modifying any step in the list.