Blender3D is a great and extremely powerful 3D rendering program which is capable of producing graphical scenes that look like they were rendered with 3D Studio MAX. It's free and it's open source and it has a published book that can be bought either online or at any large bookstore (Barne's N Noble/Borders/etc.)
Either way, it's a neat program but unless you're willing to sit down and work for hours learning the interface, it may not be a good program for you. As the laws of our world suggest, the more powerfull and effective something is, the more complex its interface. There's no exception with Blender.
Definatly a program for those who don't want to pay thousands of dollars for a commercial suite. Definatly
not a program for programmers.
======
P.S.
----------
I forgot to mention... the link stormy provided is
way too specific. Use the following link:
http://www.blender3d.org