3d software

Can anyone recommend any free 3d modeling software. I have experience with 3dsmax. I have recently tried OpenFX.

You could try Blender3D.
It's quite powerfull and I personally like it very much. It has a steep learning curve though.
But there are a number of good video tutorials available from the blender site to get you started.

what are you going to do with it ? just play around ? if so then Google sketch up works very good
http://sketchup.google.com/

I want to design game characters firstly.

GMax used to be the tool of choice but it was discontinued. Guess it took too much business away from 3DSMax (GMax was essentially 3DSMax lite).

Truespace (http://www.caligari.com) is nice and not too expensive.
In fact they've made an earlier version available for free: URL=http://www.caligari.com/Products/trueSpace/tS3/resources/default.html]http://www.caligari.com/Products/trueSpace/tS3/resources/default.html[/url]
Tried Blender but couldn't get it to work (but that was several years ago, it's bound to have improved by now).
[ November 29, 2006: Message edited by: Jeroen T Wenting ]

Thanks for all your helpful advice people.
I have decided in the short term to go with gmax because I have treid the 30 day free try with 3dsmax recently

I fact Im going to go for true space since gmax doesn't have renderer

Originally posted by Jan Spengen:
You could try Blender3D.

Thanks for the tip.

Milkshape 3D is popular as well. It's commmercial but only $25.