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What're some good options? Preferably on the cheap/free side, but obviously that might not be possible.

I always recommend TinkerCad as a place to start learning for free. It's basic...really basic...but it's a good starting point. And it's website based, so there's no downloads except for your finished files

 TheEyeOfNight wrote:
I always recommend TinkerCad as a place to start learning for free. It's basic...really basic...but it's a good starting point. And it's website based, so there's no downloads except for your finished files

Just google TinkerCad, I'd assume?

Is this the right site?

 JNAProductions wrote:

 TheEyeOfNight wrote:
I always recommend TinkerCad as a place to start learning for free. It's basic...really basic...but it's a good starting point. And it's website based, so there's no downloads except for your finished files

Just google TinkerCad, I'd assume?

Is this the right site?

Yep, that's the one. You can export the files when you're done to print out

There’s always Wings3D, you can export and import stl files, takes a tiny amount of getting used to but it’s a good piece of software and best or all it’s free!

What about Blender? To anyone with experience with these things, which of those three would be best?

I suggest Blender - I've been using it for a living on near daily basis for couple of years now, and while it has a bit of a learning curve, it has probably the best/fastest modeling tools and handles sculpting quite nicely, so you can do everything with a single program. It is frequently updated, it has good community, there are plenty of tutorials and learning materials for it etc.. and it's long past the years of being shortcut-only software which made it difficult to acces it some 10 years ago.

What do you want to use it for?

You can also try FreeCAD which does basic geometry pretty well, Sculptris for clay shaping and if you like the idea of making your models out of C++ there is OpenSCAD.

Blender is pretty good and arguably the "best" of the group, It's quite complex tho and takes a while to learn, but work your way through all the tutorials that you can get your hands on and you'll get used to it.

As they are all free you can always download them all and mess about trying some tutorials until you find one you like.

If you're only making weapons and vehicles SketchUp could be another option, super easy to use, and it's free. Only downside is that it sucks for doing organic shapes.

Sculptris, of course. Pretty sure its still free.

https://pixologic.com/sculptris/emails/operating-system.php

Even though Sculptris is very powerful, I definitely recommend doing the 45-day free trial of Zbrush, its professional big brother. Obviously its cost is pretty high and probably not something you want to pay unless you are serious about sculpting, BUT getting to use something as powerful and awesome as zbrush for free can give you a very solid barometer of what you're looking for in a sculpting program.

I went in to it saying theres no way Id pay that kind of price, but by the end of the 45 day trial I was completely hooked.